Chosen Solution
Hello I have got a (second) MacBook 17" 2.93 GHz C2D unibody from early 2009. Last days I noticed, that the sound devices (input / output) disappeared in preferences pane. Also I do not have any startup chime. I reset NVRAM / PRAM, SMC and also I took off the battery and interestingly, this helped from time to time. Lets say 2 out of 5 attempts to get it back to life are successful. Also I repaired file system permissions. I checked it by installing Win7 with boot camp, but also the sound devices do not appear in Windows. It seems to be the fact, that if I do not switch on the MacBook for 1 or 2 days (or even longer) and switch it on then, the sound devices appear again; also sometimes the volume keys on the keyboard do react very, very slow (took about 2 or 3 seconds until I get the sign on screen after pressing). I tried it by installing Snow Leopard, 10.6.8, and Mountain Lion, 10.8.4 - no difference at all. Any suggestions? Thanks, Stone
As a work around you could use a USB audio adapter, USB audio is independent of on board analog audio. Some of these have built in microphones… most have audio in/out ports. If this Answer is helpful please remember to return and mark it Accepted.
It sounds like if both the input and output device is gone from the sound panel on OS X it must be a hardware failure. OS X can not communicate with the device even if it finds it. The chips are on the logic board so it sounds like you need a logi board repair. Do you see a light inside the headphone jack? Not sure it would help since the digital output can hang sometimes and needs to be reset. But if OS X does not list in and output devices it can not communicate with them and it seems to be a hardware failure.
