It sounds like you need to recompile your kernel (gasp!). It's not as big a job as it might first appear, and so long as you KEEP A BACKUP of your existing kernel and of the new kernel options.
Boot into Windows. Determine as much as you possibly can about your hardware (unless you have the original manuals/documents lying handy
). For the sound card, you can do this by 'right-clicking' My Computer, going to Properties and then to system properties. Make a list of all the IRQs, DMAs and IO addresses for your soundcard. With some soundcards (like mine) you will see many entries. For example, I have 'Windows Sound System' and 'SB16', with different IRQs, etc, even though I've only got the one sound-card (CMI8330, onboard).
Reboot into Linux. Open a terminal window, go to '/usr/src/linux' and type 'make xconfig' (it might be './make xconfig'). Only change the soundcard part as the others are default, and
should work anyway. Go to the 'save settings to file' bit, and save the setting to a file
. I always save the settings to a Windows Partition aswell, so that
should I completely wreck my Linux system, I've still got all the options, so I can sort out what went wrong.
Exit from the 'xconfig' program and then type 'make dep' followed by 'make clean' (I believe that 'make dep; make clean' on one line works, but I've never tried it). Once everything is done, type 'make bzImage' with a capital I in Image. And finally 'make bzlilo'. If this last step doesn't work, just run 'lilo'.
Now, what
should happen is that your old kernel will be renamed '/oldkernel' or something, and your new one will be '/vmlinuz' (don't ask
me about why it's spelt with a z here), and running lilo (or make bzlilo) remakes the lilo config file and points to both as OLD and LINUX respectively (I think).
As I only tried RedHat for about 4 weeks, I'm not sure what happend with the nice boot screen that you would normally get, but the standard Lilo screen is not that unforgiving.
Now, I'm saying that your sound-card
will now work, but this works for almost all supported cards. I'm actually still having problems with my s/c because it's a bit of a crappy one. You
may have to use something called ALSA (www.alsa-project.org).
Good luck.