Sound card gone from pactl

Question

I'm not sure when this happened or why, but pacmd list-cards shows 0 card(s) available..

Now my audio doens't work, and all I see in the Sounds application is "dummy output".

How can I re-add the sound card? I should note that I wasn't messing with this. One day it just randomly stopped working.

This is what I see from aplay -l:

**** List of PLAYBACK Hardware Devices ****
card 0: PCH [HDA Intel PCH], device 0: ALC255 Analog [ALC255 Analog]
  Subdevices: 0/1
  Subdevice #0: subdevice #0   

I have tried googling for this and tried various fixes such as sudo apt-get dist-upgrade and re-installing the audio stuff. Nothing has worked so far.

Answer 1

Solved it by first running:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get dist-upgrade
sudo apt-get autoremove

then running:

sudo killall pulseaudio
rm -rf ~/.config/pulse
pulseaudio -k

This restarts pulse and re-builds the config files.