[mythtv-users] Boot Sound Volume Set to Zero, Realtek ALC888, GA-EP31-DS3L

[f-myth-users at media.mit.edu]

You could try a big hammer and see if changing the volume does
anything at all in the filesystem, which might give you a lead.

In other words, boot, wait a few minutes to make your life simpler,
change the volume control, and then run something like

  sudo find / -mmin -5 -ls

and maybe even

  sudo find / -cmin -5 -ls

[This assumes that you can scan your filesystem in substantially less
than 5 minutes; if not, increase that number, especially on the second
one if you run both sequentially.  The "wait a few minutes" is so you
don't wind up seeing every file that booting touches, which could be a
bunch.]

You'll get a bunch of cruft; you could also play games with specifying
all your actual-disk-based-filesystems manually instead of as /, or
you could use -prune if you're good with find syntax, or you could
even do

    sudo find / -mmin -5 -ls | grep -v /sys | grep -v /proc

just as a simple first pass, since it's not like you're going to be
running this command more than a couple of times.

The point is you're looking for files that were modified suspiciously
close to when you changed the volume control.  That might tell you
where to look---either what tool might be scriptable to fix this,
or even what sort of script to run to smash a saved, known-correct
version of this in place of whatever's overwriting it.

(If you have any NFS-mounted filesystems under root, use -prune or
unmount them so you don't scan across the mountpoint, which will
take forever.)

P.S.  This assumes that alsactl store/restore are already doing the
right thing, etc.