Pulseaudio not working kernel driver broken

Question

Since I plugged in a broken HDD drive, my pulseaudio won't work. At startup ubuntu stayed checking whether it worked and it took a long time to boot (several start jobs were started).

If I try to start it from console I get the following output.

W: [pulseaudio] alsa-mixer.c: Your kernel driver is broken: it reports a volume range from 0 to 0 which makes no sense.
W: [pulseaudio] alsa-mixer.c: Your kernel driver is broken: it reports a 
volume range from 0 to 0 which makes no sense.
W: [pulseaudio] authkey.c: Failed to open cookie file '/root/.config/pulse/cookie': No such file or directory
W: [pulseaudio] authkey.c: Failed to load authentication key '/root/.config/pulse/cookie': No such file or directory
W: [pulseaudio] authkey.c: Failed to open cookie file '/root/.pulse-cookie': No such file or directory
W: [pulseaudio] authkey.c: Failed to load authentication key '/root/.pulse-cookie': No such file or directory

If I try vlc I get the following output:

[000055b30db07200] alsa audio output error: cannot open ALSA device "default": No such file or directory

I saw many people with the same issues but their solutions somehow didn't work for me. pulseaudio -D came in many of them but for me this outputs Daemon startup failed.

Due to these tutorials, I did delete .pulse, since it wasn't created at a reboot or startup of pulseaudio, I don't know if it's a problem.

I'm quite new to ubuntu, so don't hesitate to explain whatever it is daemon does and how my HDD affected my kernel.

I'm not afraid to use the terminal as this is the reason why I switched to ubuntu.

System is Ubuntu 19.10 (Eoan Ermine)

Kernel is 5.3.0-29-generic x86_64

I also changed my home directory to another hard drive, but this shouldn't be a problem because the path would stay the same.

Thanks anyway.

I indeed ran pulseaudio with root access because if I just wrote pulseaudio it said

Home directory not accessible: permission denied.

If I run systemctl --user restart pulseaudio I get:

Job for pulseaudio.service failed because the control process exited with error code.
See "systemctl --user status pulseaudio.service" and "journalctl --user -xe" for details.

If I run systemctl --user status pulseaudio.service I get: run systemctl for more info

Mär 02 16:40:41 tom-X570-AORUS-ELITE systemd[1320]: Failed to start Sound Service.
Mär 02 16:40:41 tom-X570-AORUS-ELITE systemd[1320]: pulseaudio.service: Service RestartSec=100ms expired, scheduling restart.
Mär 02 16:40:41 tom-X570-AORUS-ELITE systemd[1320]: pulseaudio.service: Scheduled restart job, restart counter is at 5.
Mär 02 16:40:41 tom-X570-AORUS-ELITE systemd[1320]: Stopped Sound Service.
Mär 02 16:40:41 tom-X570-AORUS-ELITE systemd[1320]: pulseaudio.service: Start request repeated too quickly.
Mär 02 16:40:41 tom-X570-AORUS-ELITE systemd[1320]: pulseaudio.service: Failed with result 'exit-code'.
Mär 02 16:40:41 tom-X570-AORUS-ELITE systemd[1320]: Failed to start Sound Service.

If you need the output of journalctl do tell me.

Answer 1

It seems that removing and reinstalling pulseaudio fixes this problem for some people. However, the only methods I have seen are quite destructive as many packages depend on pulseaudio. To circumvent the dependency issue, we can purge pulseaudio using dpkg instead of apt.

First, run the following commands:

sudo apt update
sudo apt upgrade
sudo dpkg -P --force-all pulseaudio
sudo rm -r ~/.pulse ~/.asound* ~/.pulse-cookie ~/.config/pulse

_{If you get an error at the last step, ignore the error.}

Next, reinstall and restart ALSA and pulseaudio:

sudo apt install --reinstall -o Dpkg::Options::="--force-confmiss" pulseaudio
sudo alsa force-reload
systemctl --user restart pulseaudio

Finally, you can check the status of pulseaudio with the following command:

systemctl --user status pulseaudio

It should return as "loaded" and "active". If not, reboot and check the status again.