I dual boot my work laptop using a USB pin drive. My OS is Linux Mint 17.2, KDE. This morning I had a few other pin drives plugged in and accidentally unplugged my OS drive. It's happened before, the kids pull it out or while moving it gets dislodged. But this time after rebooting I can't reconnect to the network. I use wireless all the time so that for work when I disconnect from the docking station I don't lose my VPN connection. I rebooted to Windows and wireless still works, but when booted to Mint, I get this weird red hollow box in the system section of the task bar. WHen I click on it, it shows 3 icons at the top, hovering over them, it says Wireless disabled, mobile broadband disabled and Airplane mode disabled. Airplane mode is white while the other two are red. I can't find any way to enable the wireless.

Don't know if this is part of the cause or not, but a synaptic update was in progress for updating a virtualization app. I don't use it, but figured it wouldn't hurt to update it. When I unplugged the USB, it had some message about failing.

Any ideas on how to fix this?

I recently had similar - read up on rfkill. I had to fiddle around to get the "unblock all" to work - don't recall the specifics.

rfkill doesn't seem to do anything when I use it. I tried with my credentials, and with sudo. rfkill list all, lists nothing at all. rfkill unblock all, just returns to the prompt. I rebooted and wireless and mobile broadband are still disabled.

I looked up many posts on the net and couldn't find anything to help. So I formatted and reinstalled Mint. All good now. That's one of the many great things about Linux. As long as you don't format your home partition, as soon as you finish reinstalling, all your settings are just as they were before you reinstalled.

Just noticed this again - in future, try su'ing to root (sudo su -).