no sound card found after upgrade

Question

Just upgraded an old Dell 5150 to 16.10. Now sound card is not detected and instead all that shows is 'dummy output'. Found a few threads regarding this problem and followed the instructions - namely purge alsa and pulseaudio, then install same, followed by reload and then reboot. Still no card detected but 'system settings now also gone. Ran the upgrade again, followed the instructions again, exact same result (proof of insanity?). Dead sound card perhaps?

as per instructions Output of sudo lshw | grep -A11 multimedia

 -multimedia UNCLAIMED
             description: Audio device
             product: NM10/ICH7 Family High Definition Audio Controller
             vendor: Intel Corporation
             physical id: 1b
             bus info: pci@0000:00:1b.0
             version: 01
             width: 64 bits
             clock: 33MHz
             capabilities: pm msi pciexpress bus_master cap_list
             configuration: latency=0
             resources: memory:efffc000-efffffff

Answer 1

I would expect that sound device to be picked up automatically by the module snd-hda-intel My best guess is your missing the firmware loaders and possibly alsa-base as well.

The firmware is not automatically installed for some reason (legal?) You need to enable the multiverse repository in Software & Updates if it's not already enabled.

Issue this command sudo apt install alsa-firmware-loaders alsa-base

You probably already have alsa-base but it won't do any harm to attempt to install it if you do so to be on the safe side I've included it in the command above. I don't think you'll have to reboot, but it can't hurt to do so. If this doesn't do the trick we will have to resort to some more in-depth troubleshooting