Broken WiFi on 2010 MacBook Pro 15" after Continuity Activation Tool

[okpych]

Hello!

This is finally my first thread on here, and this one is a doozy. I'm still scratching my head over what on earth happened.

I recently purchased a 2010 MacBook Pro 15-inch with the i7 configuration and the matte screen for a pretty good price, and it worked absolutely flawlessly for the first day I had it.

I decided, "hey, I'm using macOS High Sierra, why not put a newer airport card in and try running Continuity Activation Tool just to see what happens?". And so I did. Initially, I was surprised to see that WiFi and Bluetooth were working with my new card installed (the card being one from a Mid-2012 MBP 13"), and on top of that, AirDrop from my iPhone was working as well! I thought, "wow! this might of actually worked!" However, things kind of took a turn for the worse when I restarted and found that my WiFi stopped working, and the dropdown menu simply said there was no hardware installed. Despite this, Bluetooth continued to work perfectly fine.

At this point, I went ahead and put the original card back in. No difference. WiFi was still broken, Bluetooth continued working. So I ran the "uninstallation with support" in CAT and nothing happened. Did the same thing with the "uninstallation without support". No change.

So I went ahead and reinstalled High Sierra over top of my previous installation, thinking that would help. Nada. Did a fresh install after. Still nothing.

Here's a brief summary of everything (i can at least remember) that I have done so far:

1. reseated the WiFi card
2. disconnected and reconnected the WiFi Card
3. Grabbed the WiFi card and cable from my MacBook7,1 to see if it made any difference (it did not)
4. Used the WiFi Cable from my MacBook7,1 with the card that was in this machine
4. Installed macOS Big Sur with OCLP (I mean, I was running out of ideas at this point)
5. Reset SMC/NVRAM like several times at this point
6. I even went ahead and did that thing that removes the EFI lock on these older machines, just to see if it did anything. It, of course, did not.

I went ahead and reinstalled HS on it for the third time and called it quits. After all of the carnage of everything I tried doing to repair it, I'm still left with no WiFi, but perfectly functioning Bluetooth. It's overall a very weird situation.

The one thing that alarms me the most, is that in the boot picker menu, I don't even get an option to select a WiFi network, meaning that it's definitely beyond a software issue.

So... what do you guys think? Any clue? I'm stumped.

Attached are some screenshots of what System Profiler reports with BT/WiFi

 

[KingCornWallis]

What did you find out on this? Did you poke the people over on the CAT GitHub?

Had this problem too, but an in-place OS reinstall solved it. And actually, the tool gave our computer a black screen...was very scary and we didn't know what caused it until one day the black screen finally disappeared and there was an error message relating to CAT awaiting us.

If you've wiped the internal disk drive and done an internet recovery install already, then you can rule out a software issue. It's going to be hardware or firmware, however as far as I know the CAT only messes with Kexts (software level). Would be amazed if the firmware got touched in some way...yet my personal experience suggests that CAT is touching things that it shouldn't. Is SIP enabled or disabled?

Unlikely but (grasping for reasons) how sure are you that the flex cable and connectors weren't damaged? I am aware it worked initially and then a restart killed it, but it could have been originally a software problem and now a hardware problem.


In short, CAT is bad news and people should skip that tool as well as the 2012 MBP Airport Cards, and instead go for the Intriguing Industries adapter along with one of the newer AC/BT 4.0+ Airport cards.