A while back I was having some pretty serious sound quality issues. After much research and BIOS/Driver changing, among other things, the issue went away. I thought one of the drivers I had updated to had fixed it, but I was wrong.
Last night, I was running out of disk space. Last time this happened, I found a 250GB Maxtor on sale locally and bought it. In order to install it, I had to remove another hard drvie. I did some shuffling around and thought I had the largest drives installed. It turns out that instead of a 40GB drive, I had put back in a 20GB drive. So, I pulled the 20GB and put in the 40GB drive.
As soon as I booted the computer, I was slammed with a huge amount of static coming from my speakers. I opened the nForce control panel, and it was registering zero sound. Somehow this 40GB drive was causing noise in my speakers... Noise that was not going through my sound subsystem. I realized all the frustration I had before with the noise was actually caused by this hard disk.
I rebooted a few times and the noise continued. I pulled the disk out and reinstalled the 20GB drive, and the noise went away.
Very strange! Does anyone have a similar experience? Is there a way to "fix" it?