KB5003173 No Audio Device Installed

Marcus Brubaker 71

After KB5003173 audio fails. Sound settings show no output devices found and no input devices found. I've tried updating drivers, removing and reinstalling drivers. and even completely removing all audio devices from device manager and reinstalling. I don't see this as a known issue in the KB notes but lots of people are reporting this same issue. Is it being worked on?

KennyTSV 0 Reputation points

2023-09-07T00:38:08.4633333+00:00

Even though unrelated to win 10, my case can possibly be related and help at least some others with the 'no audio devices installed' situation. In my case, I was using win 8.1 a couple of days ago, and all I did was switch in an extra SATA SSD hard drive as a secondary drive. And that was absolutely enough to cause a boot file corruption on my win 8.1. That is - I notice that our operating systems can be sensitive to changes in environment - such as adding a new secondary ssd drive to my primary ssd operating system drive, or even when a secondary ssd drive glitches -- it can throw the operating system (as in booting issues). And this is what happened a couple of days ago to me.

After going through the bootrec /fixmbr etc etc process to try get booting functions working again, I was fortunate to get booting again. But surprisingly, after having win 8.1 alive and booting again and looking good, I noticed that the 'sound' (speaker) icon, which is normally white coloured, had a cross on it. All sound drivers were working. I wasted heaps of time re-installing chipset/audio drivers etc, only to find that I was still getting the 'no audio devices installed' issue. Even the sound 'properties' area was blanked out - as in inactive button state.

I then eventually came across a googled bit of information, which involved 'render' in the registry - and I did the following.

Using registry editor (aka regedit.exe), I went down this line :

HKLM - software - microsoft - windows - currentversion - mmdevice - audio - render

I then DELETED 'render' from registry - totally removed it. Then I rebooted win 8.1 straight after this.

When win 8.1 rebooted, audio features fully restored, as in the 'sound icon' became white coloured, instead of having the cross.

I probably got lucky with the 'render' registry key removal. What windows 8.1 did after the removal (and after rebooting) was it created a new key of the same name (ie. 'render'), and then populated its sub-tree elements automatically.

I don't think that any amount of re-installing drivers and other steps would have got me out of this one. The operating system was just stuck in a situation that required this extra manual intervention to get out of, and none of the 'repair' kit methods or other online 'help' methods appear to have considered. I was actually on the verge of no-win situation, and was even about to just do a full re-installation of windows, because I had pretty much tried all other recommended approaches.

So if you have tried everything else, then try this too. It could possibly help.

6 answers

StanG 1 Reputation point

2021-10-26T12:38:36.52+00:00

I can confirm that repairing the registry value mentioned by @63084460 is the real fix without compromising security.
To make things easier I have created a reg file you can import.
https://ares.gobien.be/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/fix_audio_service_no_devices.zip

After importing, reboot the computer (or restart both Windows Audio services).

You can read more about this issue in my blogpost.
https://ares.gobien.be/2021/10/windows-10-may-2021-update-can-break-audio-service/
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