cancel
Showing results for 
Search instead for 
Did you mean: 

Zenbook UX31A w/dual-boot: No sound from headphone jack in Windows, Linux ok -solved?

jsd8cc
Level 7
Hi all. I'm stumped.

I have a Zenbook UX31A, with a non-OEM, clean install of Windows 7 (I've also experienced this problem on Windows 8). Actually, I'm dual-booting Ubuntu and Windows 7, but the problem only exists in Windows.

The problem: The sound works perfectly fine, except for I get no sound from the headphone jack. The headphone jack works fine in Ubuntu, so I know it's not a hardware issue (or my headphones). The speakers in the Windows volume control (in the taskbar) show audio playing when headphones are plugged in. If I unplug them, I get audio from the speakers.

The Realtek software detects that headphones are plugged in:
http://i.imgur.com/wPMXAIW.png

This is the driver version installed (which I believe is the most recent, according to the Asus product support page):
http://i.imgur.com/drsVAsx.png

The only possibility I've come up with is that the headphones are muted somewhere, but I cannot find / know of no option for this in Windows or Realtek.

Thanks for the help.


P.S. Interesting how there is no official notebook forum on support.asus.com. Took me awhile to find this forum. Why?
19,717 Views
3 REPLIES 3

dataman
Level 7
I have the exact same problem. Headphones won't work. Neither on Windows 7 nor on Windows 8.1.
With a Linux system everything works perfect.

I've tried the Realtek driver from <> as well as the builtin Windows driver. The Windows driver worked once or twice, but unfortunately I couldn't reproduce that.

(1) Shutdown computer the normal way. (2) From off state, hold down power button for 40 seconds. This cleared whatever the hell was blocking the headphone output on my Zenbook!

So after repeatedly running into this issue I took some time to deliberately reproduce the problem and then try to fix this. Here are my results:

The Problem lies in dual-booting a Linux Distribution and some version of Windows. I got this problem with ArchLinux and openSUSE on the Linux
side and Windows 7, 8, 8.1 and 10 on the Windows side. In Linux the headphone jack worked fine, in Windows it didn't.

Here's how I reproducibly fixed it:
1. Shutdown the system
2. Hold down the power button. The system will turn on and after some seconds will turn off again.
3. When it's off again you may release the power button
4. Start Windows and the headphone jack works

It doesn't have to be 40 seconds as mentioned by rhubarb. For me it took ~5sec. The system actually doesn't need to be off.
You can just kill it by holding the power button and it will fix the sound as well, but I prefer doing a clean shutdown before.
The thing is:
You have to do this every time you had Linux running and then want to boot into Windows.