good you got it fixed.
sometimes with mint, you just need to shutdown and turn it on again. restart doesn't seem to work, and you will have sound again.
i experienced the same issue with both mint 17.2 and kubuntu 15.04.
the solution was on a five year old forum post and the person didn't know why this worked either.

im not sure if you have already tried this but if this happens again ctrl + alt + backspace, then login again. if that fails do the shutdown thing.

something else to try before making another re-install

I was going to comment that most sound cards tend to be compatible with Sound Blaster Pro, so if worse came to worse you could force the driver to be Sound Blaster and it would work. (Naturally it wouldn't allow special hardware features, but you'd have sound most likely).

Oh well.

Thanks! I'm not too sad about it b/c I only had a few files I really needed to transfer over b/c the install was so fresh. Most of my stuff was on Dropbox already. And it was nice to get a fresh install with the /home partition so I can change things up in the future without worrying about backing up files.


I'll keep that in mind!

Could you post the output of "uname -a" here so that anyone who finds this post will know what kernel version you ended up using?

uname -a

Linux MintyDesktop 4.2.0-23-generic #28~14.04.1-Ubuntu SMP Thu Dec 31 13:40:42 UTC 2015 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux