Update Broke Audio on T420

Question

Date: June 12ish-13ish, 2018 update.
Suspected Cause: Kernel update from 4.13.0-43 to 4.13.0-45

Have a Thinkpad T420 and just updated today. Tried watching a Youtube video and noticed my dedicated volume buttons no longer work and I had no sound. Same goes for mute speakers button and mute mic button. I can get audio to output but I have to go up and toggle on the on/off rocker and manually adjust volume from top menu bar, but only system sounds are heard nothing from the browser. What is even stranger is that when I go into sound settings it shows no output or input devices! Any advice?

Answer 1

I completely removed a pulseaudio mod I installed last year and also completely purged all the audio drivers.

I then installed aptitude based on some recommendations and used that to reinstall all the stock ubuntu audio drivers using --purge along with reinstall. Still after that I had no sound.

The key was running this command and rebooting:
killall pulseaudio; rm -r ~/.config/pulse/* ; rm -r ~/.pulse*

I stole that code from the ubuntu help page at: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/SoundTroubleshootingProcedure.

If anyone else has problems hope this helps. I still cannot use the dedicated volume buttons on my keyboard. I'll work on that soon, at least my speakers work now.