ubuntu 10.04 wireless disabled after complete battery drained

[dagarshali]

Hi,
I have 64bit ubuntu 10.04 installed on lenovo ideapad y450. recently, i ended up using the laptop on battery till it died and the wireless doesnt' seem to work after i restarted the laptop after connecting the AC adapter.

when i go to network manager, i see wireless is grayed out and it says it is disabled ( the hard switch on the laptop for wireless is turned on).

Doing some research on forums, i did a sudo lshw -C network and the first line of it says
*-network DISABLED and the description is for wireless interface. I can't post the output of the laptop as i don't have a LAN connection or a usb drive to which is can copy and then post it here.

the product is PRO/Wireless 5100 AGN [shiloh] Network Connection from Intel

When i did the rfkill list, i got

0: phy0: Wireless LAN
Soft blocked: no
Hard blocked: yes

Any help to get it up would help a lot.

Thanks a bunch in advance
Vishwa

[reed9]

Hello,

Please post the output of

cat /sys/class/rfkill/rfkill0/state

This should just be a single number, corresponding to

0: RFKILL_STATE_SOFT_BLOCKED
transmitter is turned off by software
1: RFKILL_STATE_UNBLOCKED
transmitter is (potentially) active
2: RFKILL_STATE_HARD_BLOCKED
transmitter is forced off by something outside of
the driver's control.
This file is deprecated because it can only properly show
three of the four possible states, soft-and-hard-blocked is
missing.

In theory, I believe 2 should only show if the hardware kill switch you mentioned is in fact blocking it. (You've double and triple checked the hardware switch, right?)

If it doesn't show unblocked try

su -
echo "1" > /sys/class/rfkill/rfkill0/state

and try bringing the interface up

sudo ifconfig wlan0 up

EDIT: Sorry, Ubuntu, replace the line su - above with

sudo su -

or you should be able to do it

echo "1" | sudo tee /sys/class/rfkill/rfkill0/state

[dagarshali]

Hi,
the out put of the cat command is 2.

I am assuming the hardware switch is the slider switch that is in the on position for the wireless. I did a few times just to be sure and I still get the same output.

Regards,
Vishwa

[reed9]

Hmm, I've found some bug reports at various times of the rfkill getting stuck at "2". No definite solution, but try this:

sudo service network-manager stop
sudo modprobe -r iwlagn
sudo modprobe -r rfkill
sudo modprobe iwlagn

Flip the physical kill switch to the disable and back to the enable position.

Restart the network manager

sudo service network-manager start

This is basically what worked according to here.

[dagarshali]

hi,
I tried what you suggested ..

When i use sudo modprobe -r rfkill, i get

FATAL: Module rfkill is buil

tin

Also, the first time around, when i tried
cat /sys/class/rfkill/rfkill0/state, i got 2

but after I did the modprobe, there is no rfkill0, instead is it rfkill2 now and the value of cat /sys/class/rfkill/rfkill2/state, i got 2

but, other than that, i still dont' have the wireless running

[reed9]

Any chance you have an option in the BIOS to toggle the wireless on/off?

[dagarshali]

hi,
Yes there is .. it is currently enabled..

Vishwa

[reed9]

Try also

sudo modprobe -r iwlagn
sudo modprobe iwlagn disable_hw_scan=1

If that helps, to load the module that way at boot do

echo "options iwlagn disable_hw_scan=1" | sudo tee -a /etc/modprobe.d/modprobe.conf

[dagarshali]

hi..
that didn't help either..

vishwa

[reed9]

Can you boot up a live Ubuntu CD and see if it works from the live environment?