[Wylug-help] Sound problems in Kubuntu: Do I have a kernel issue?

[John Erskine]

Running Hardy 8.04 on AMD 64, with nvidia MCP51 High Definition Audio card
 
I'm having a problem with sound on my Hardy installation, after an abortive 
installation of some updates recently. As the installation slowed badly I 
switched off like an idiot. Hence the problem...
 
I've sorted the file system with fsck, and I recovered the screen resolution 
too. 
 
However a number of attempts haven't yielded a solution to the problem of no 
sound.
 
Kmix shows the red circle with the white X, and the message 'Mixer cannot be 
found'
 
I've checked system settings, and that hasn't sorted anything. I've also used 
a few guides, particularly the one at Ubuntu Forums (Comprehensive Sound 
Problems Solutions Guide)
 
Unfortunately, much of this is negated as I can't find if there's an ALSA 
driver for my soundcard. 
 
I've opened a terminal and run a few scripts. The sequence that I've used is 
 
 aplay -l
 aplay: device_list:205: no soundcards found...
 
then I've also run 

sudo lspci -v
 
and got 
 
 00:10.1 Audio device: nVidia Corporation MCP51 High Definition Audio (rev a2)
 Subsystem: ASUSTeK Computer Inc. Unknown device 81cb
 Flags: bus master, 66MHz, fast devsel, latency 0, IRQ 11
 Memory at fe028000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=16K]
 Capabilities: [44] Power Management version 2
 Capabilities: [50] Message Signalled Interrupts: Mask+ 64bit+ Queue=0/0 
Enable-
 Capabilities: [6c] HyperTransport: MSI Mapping
 
Then I tried
 
 'sudo modprobe snd-'
 
 which gets the response 
 
 FATAL: Module snd_ not found.
 
 Then
 
 'lsmod | grep snd:'
 
 which didn't get any response
 
 I followed this with 
 
 'sudo apt-get --purge remove linux-sound-base alsa-base alsa-utils'
 
 this runs, and generates the following error message
 
 (Reading database ... dpkg: error 
processing /var/cache/apt/archives/linux-image
 -2.6.24-19-generic_2.6.24-19.36_i386.deb (--unpack):
 files list file for package `linux-image-2.6.24-19-generic' is missing final 
newline
 Errors were encountered while processing:
 /var/cache/apt/archives/linux-image-2.6.24-19-generic_2.6.24-19.36_i386.deb
 Processing was halted because there were too many errors.
 E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1)
 
Running any variant of apt-get (update, install, upgrade) always comes up with 
the same error message.

Any ideas on what I've got wrong?

John Erskine