Sound Issues- Is My PowerBook Dying?

[SummerBreeze]

For the last two weeks, my 12" 1.5Ghz PowerBook running Leopard has being doing a strange thing. After either restarting my computer or logging back in to my account, the sound completely goes away (except for the start-up chime). The speaker isn't present in my menubar, and when I press the volume up and down keys I get the volume screen shown with a circle with a bar through it. The sound preference pane says "no output devices found," even when I plug in external speakers or headphones. My iPod also won't mount when this happens.

A PRAM reset appears to temporarily solve the issue, but it has now happened a few times and I'm quite worried that there's something seriously wrong with my PowerBook, which is now getting up there in age. I'd like to hold off on my buying a MacBook Pro until the summer, but that won't happen if my logic board is failing or something like that.

Can anyone shed some light on this issue? It's really starting to freak me out...

 

[weeniewawa]

sounds like a software issue, did you do a clean install or update install of leopard?

 

[karnsculpture]

I am also having the same problem since installing Leopard with my iBook G4 1.42GHZ, but some people have reported the problem before with no resolution (I will post some links in another post). The problem seems to manifest itself when I have iTunes on and I put the computer to sleep. When I wake it up again I have the same problem you have. If iTunes was not on, there is no problem.

I am also having an annoying problem with iTunes in that when I insert a CD it is visible in iTunes for a split second before disappearing. The CD is also not visible in Finder. I have to eject the CD using F12 and then re-insert, when it behaves normally. This is very annoying when ripping CD singles (and I have a lot of those I am loading on to my library).

 

[karnsculpture]

Other threads that may relate to this problem that I have found:

https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/397970/

https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/385195/

https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/308020/

 

[SummerBreeze]

Thank you everyone, definitely seems to be a software issue involving Leopard and iTunes. The problem that karnsculpture is having with cds has been happening to me with my iPod and iPhone, the devices will be connected for a split second, but then they will fail to mount.

I may think about moving everything to my external and doing a clean install if the problem keeps persisting. The second thread that karnsculpture recommended moving the com.apple.audio.Devicesettings.plist file to the desktop, hopefully that may help as well.