Lion killed Wifi/Airport on MacBook Pro - won't turn on

AdamTro · Jul 21, 2011

Had always had a weird issue with Airport/Wifi on this laptop, 2.93 duo. If I would turn off Airport, then turn it back on the machine would freeze. Often when starting up it would freeze (verbose logging startup seemed to point to an Airport issue). Then other times it would start up no problem and Airport would be on.

Today installed Lion. Airport was working fine, was doing emails, browsing. Updated Little Snitch and did a re-start. Since then I cannot get Wifi to turn on. Have disabled LS, thinking that might be the prob. I choose "Turn on Wifi" and nothing happens. In system prefs it won't turn on there either. Click the button and nothing happens.

Have deleted the Wifi out of the interface box and re-added it, thinking that might fix it. Nope.

Under 10.6.8 that interface was called Airport, now under 10.7 it's called Wifi...weird. Is that something Apple changed?

Someone please help. Airport/Wifi is dead on my MBP with Lion.

karmski · Jul 21, 2011

I'm not sure that this is the same issue, but it may be related. Since updating to Lion the system no longer automatically joins a wireless network on start-up. This means that I must manually choose the network every time, which is very annoying.

Another unrelated issue is that the zoom feature ^ scroll up doesn't work after a start up from full Shut Down, but seems to work again after a Restart.

Any ideas?

stumbletown · Jul 21, 2011

Strange. I installed Lion today. First boot was slow, then little snitch came up asking to be registered so I uninstalled it. Asked to be restarted, then failed to boot and after a cold restart came back but with no wifi, battery icon, and few other glitches. Not sure if Little Snitched deleted something important.

[Update] Resolved the issue by restarting and using cmd-R to boot into recovery mode and repair the disk.

AdamTro · Jul 21, 2011

Bump. Still dead. Airport/Wifi won't turn on. This thing is a brick.

shiretu · Aug 11, 2011

I had an even nasty situation. After updating to Lion, from time to time, after reboot, all my icons from the upper right corner (airport, date,battery, etc) were not there. The only thing there was the spotlight icon. Moreover, when I moved the mouse over it, I had the infamous beach ball rolling. I thought it was SysteUIServer process, so I just opened a terminal and killed that one. Nothing happened... no network. So, I thought that I should manually bring up the network card via terminal so I can browse internet in search for answers. I did ifconfig <parameters> en1 up. Guess what... the terminal is frozen now. Not even kill can kill it

Opening the system preferences and trying to access the network settings resulted in the same way: window frozen...

(Heads up, I resurrected it in the end. I'm writing from it

)

The next thing I did is to invalidate kext caches. I did:

Code:

#always boot in verbose mode so I can see the dots while building kext caches
#when they are only few, that means the computer uses the cache. When they are many
#that means the caches are actually re-build
#update the caches via the utility
sudo nvram boot-args="-v"

#force cache update via utility
sudo kextcache -update-volume / --force -v 6

#and just to make sure I do the right thing, I specifically
#put my system volume name. Change accordingly in your case (change OSX to yours)
sudo kextcache -update-volume /Volumes/OSX --force -v 6

#last, try one more approach. touch all the folders containing caches
#first find them:
sudo find / -type d -name "Extensions"

#next, only pick up the "interesting" ones (this is my thinking....)
sudo touch /Library/Java/Extensions
sudo touch /System/Library/Caches
sudo touch /System/Library/Caches/com.apple.*
sudo touch /System/Library/Java/Extensions
sudo touch /System/Library/Caches/com.apple.kext.caches/Directories/System/Library/Extensions

As you probably guessed, nothing happened after countless reboots applying each method one at the time... SImply put, the caches refused to be rebuilt. I was only getting few dots on the booting console. I was desperate, so I did a major leap forward, reinsured by the fact that I had a 15 minutes old backup of everything on my Time Capsule.

So, I did the following

Code:

#create a copy just in case
mkdir /backup

#move the freakin' caches out of the way
sudo mv /System/Library/Caches /backup/

JackPot!!! It worked. I was getting a lot of dots in the boot console AND everything started working just fine. Finally!!!!!!

Cheers,
Andrei

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Lion killed Wifi/Airport on MacBook Pro - won't turn on

AdamTro

macrumors member

karmski

macrumors newbie

stumbletown

macrumors newbie

AdamTro

macrumors member

shiretu

macrumors newbie

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