I’ve seen this a few times now.   I’ve done a lot of Hard Drive to SSD upgrades recently and each time I’ve used the free version of Acronis True Image that comes with the Crucial SSDs.

This has worked wonderfully (apart from today when I hit a drive with bad blocks, but that’s another article) and the upgrade process has been very smooth.   However I’ve noticed that on a few machines, the audio device is disabled after the clone?

The computers that had this problem all had one thing in common – Realtek HD Audio Controller Devices.

Turns out there’s a simple fix though:

Start Regedit and navigate to the following Key:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\controlSet001\Services\HDAudBus

Modify REG_DWORD “Start” and change it to be 3

In Device Manager, uninstall the “high defintion audio controller”

Scan for hardware changes and it should reinstall the device and fix the problem!