I bought a creative sound blaster z sound card some time ago. Since then I have had an issue where many times on a cold boot there would not be any sound coming from the sound card. It would get fixed on a subsequent reboot.

After reading on some forums people suggested that the issue was with the fast boot of the system where the time is not sufficient for initialization of the sound blaster z sound card. Also the fast startup option of Windows saves the state of drives to the hibernate file, and reads it when the system is booted is next time. It seems the sound blaster driver is not tested for this situation.

To fix this issue I disabled fast boot, set a 5 second POST delay in in bios and disable fast startup in Windows power settings. After that the card works fine on first boot.

Creative should either fix the issue, or else document it on their website.

With all the new advances in system boot up times we are now seeing these issues, like secure boot causing many video cards to not work, fast boot causing issues with sound cards etc…