wlan0 Stopped Working After Laptop Battery Died
I'm using a MSI Wind u100 Netbook running Slackware 13.1
I'm very new to Linux but trying my best to learn it. I configured my card to work on my hidden network and worked flawlessly. Even connected to the college network just using the iwconfig wlan0 essid "ESSID" so it didn't effect my configuration files, came home, connected to my hidden network just fine again. I got a little careless, but I was also curious to see what would happen if my battery died cause I knew it wouldn't take much longer. Curiosity killed my wireless... I do have to use dhcpcd at startup since I haven't wrote the script to start it during startup so usually I type that and I'm connected to the internet. Since my battery put my computer into standby and I've restarted multiple times, iwlist wlan0 scan comes back saying that there was no scan results, iwconfig doesn't show essid at all, editing the rc.wireless.conf and inet1 files don't change anything at all, and ifconfig wlan0 down/up does nothing. Have searched for quite awhile with no success and it's getting late so I'm hoping there's someone out there that has the simple solution to this stupid problem. I appreciate any patience y'all show towards my ignorance. |
Let's see the output of a few commands
ifconfig -a iwconfig wlan0 lsmod |
The output for ifconfig -a is(this is just the wlan0 part):
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Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr XX:XX:XX:XX:XX:XX Code:
802.11b/g Mode:Managed Access Point: Not-Associated Forgot to mention that I also used my Ubuntu 10.04 Live CD to boot up also to see if I could get my wireless working in it (which is usually a task Hellen Keller could perform) and I came up empty handed. |
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iwconfig wlan0 > wlan0.txt See the > sign? That redirects the output to whatever is on the right. In this case it would be a text file called wlan0.txt, which you could open in any text editor. If you do a little googling on redirects, you'll find they are one of the most useful tools Linux has to offer. By the way, if you look at the lspci output, can you see what chipset your wireless card uses? That would help. |
This might sound stupid, and I apologize, but check to make sure you didn't accidentally switch the card off. The switch on mine is easy to accidentally toggle.
Aside from that, I wanted to see ifconfig -a in it's entirety to see if any other network devices were active. |
Thanks on the redirect info. I'm just on my phone right now so I can't get you the output of those commands just yet but I will as soon as i can.
Don't worry about giving me advice that sounds stupid, you never know when it is somehing like that. My laptop doesn't have a physical switch though and its a Fn+F key that toggles it so I know i didn't turn it off while in Slackware. I thought about that though and thats one of the things I tried to troubleshoot while I was booted up with my ubuntu live cd. Turned it off, back on, no change. Another thing, again I'm not at my computer so I can't see the chipset of the WiFi card but I know its a Realtek R8187SE. There maybe a T after the R but i can't remember. I know there isn't an L. I know thats sometimes in the names of realtek chips. EDIT: The wireless is Realtek RTL8187SE, just never saw that in Windows for whatever reason, but the lspci showed that. |
Ok, I got the txt files from the output of the commands, here they are:
ifconfig -a: Code:
eth0 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 00:21:85:e5:c8:00 Code:
wlan0 802.11b/g Mode:Managed Frequency=2.422 GHz Code:
Module Size Used by |
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So what I'm gathering from your output is: - The driver is loaded as there is the r8187se module in your lsmod output. According to the driver description, your chipset should work with that. - According to iwconfig, you're not connected to an access point. I suspect that you haven't really configured the wireless card. Since you're using Slackware, you really want to install wicd, which is a great tool for managing network connections. You'll find a package for wicd in the /extra directory of the Slackware install disk. Install it with installpkg, then go to /etc/rc.d and make sure rc.wicd is executable and then run it (or reboot). From your GUI, open a console and run wicd-client. That will bring up a GUI that will let you configure your card and request an IP address. If you ever find yourself with only console access, wicd-curses does the same thing as wicd-client, only without a GUI. |
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I believe I may have found in the syslog where the unclean shutdown occured. It's repeated for awhile:
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end_request: I/O error, dev sr0, sector 4195200 I attached the part of rc.inet1.conf that is relevant. I know it's an ugly file, but it was getting the job done. I didn't worry about cleaning it up because eventually I want to be able to re-enable my WPA2-AES security and configure Slackware for it. |
To humor y'all I tried scanning with my wireless broadcasting and what I expected to happen, happened. It immediately came up with "no scan results" because the card isn't scanning.
This is actually after a fresh Slackware install that I just done. I kinda half-assed it and looking back it didn't save any time. When I got to the part of using the cfdisk utility I just erased the old boot partition and made the new one one the same free space. I was hoping my problem would have at least been fixed by that but I should have formatted the swap and extra partition as well. I'll probably do that tomorrow because if that doesn't fix it then I don't know what will. Thank you all for all the help though. |
Yeah, that unclean shutdown definitely did some damage. I'm surprised that fsck wasn't forced on the next boot. Can I ask what file system your using (not really relevant to the wireless problem, just curious).
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Check your BIOS settings. I don't have an MSI Wind, but I do have an ASUS EeePC, which does have BIOS > Advanced > Onboard Devices Configuration which disabled my Camera and WLAN when I let my battery run down hard once. Apparently something caused it to lose or reset the BIOS, and the initial state appears to be Disabled for those.
Another time the battery ran down, that didn't happen, but I also plugged it in within a couple minutes to recharge, and BIOS had not changed. But the first time it ran down, I didn't get back to recharging it for over a day, so it sat for 24+ hours without any power. |
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I actually plugged it up pretty quickly after it happened, and my netbook had an orange light showing that it was really low, and not completely dead. The sudden shutdown could still damage that kind of stuff though. |
A sudden shutdown can certainly damage any number of things. But this is actually rare. The damage would happen only when something is being written at the time. With luck, the state of the disk is either that of before any writes are done, or after all of them are done. The problems are when only some of them are done. In worse cases, they are not done in order, so it can come out inconsistent where consistency would have been maintained by writes in order. They can be done out of order when the order that would maintain consistency is not the order for optimal timing. Filesystems like ext4 focus on optimal timing, so it is plausible to see out of order writes. And worse, with ext4's adherence only to Posix requirements and not legacy methods, it is possible to actually lose a file that was merely being moved, or something similar to that (e.g. normally it links first then unlinks the old name, but the out of order writes would record the unlinked directory before recording the linked directory). The journal should have saved that, but it seems either not everything gets written to the journal or the journal itself is subject to the write order issue.
The real test of the OS in my book would have been the running the Ubuntu Live CD or similar, which lets you just enter your wireless access info and get online. This works for me in 10.10. You would have wanted to test it before the incident so you'd be confident it does work on yours, and that there is no driver issue in the Live CD copy. Then knowing that, if it fails afterwards, you know its something in the state of the machine (BIOS, damaged hardware, etc). You should be able to remove the battery, at least when the machine is fully powered off, and not lose BIOS settings. Then you should be able to plug in the mains adapter and bring it up without battery. At least my brother's HP laptop can do that (completely dead battery). But from manufacturer to manufacturer or model to model I don't know if this is the case (I haven't actually tested this concept on my netbooks). So, I'm sure you'll let us know the result of the OS reinstall and/or the BIOS change. |
BTW, YOUR BIOS may have things in different locations.
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Well nothing was being wrote on the drive when it died so that's a plus.
The OS install went really smooth, but nothing has changed as far as my wlan0 issue. Still not scanning. I have used the Ubuntu Live CD before and it worked flawlessly by just typing in my information. It doesn't now so it's starting to look like a more serious problem. I looked all through my BIOS (which by the way, isn't very much) and I could't find anything about enabling/disabling wireless. I'm sure it's an on board chip so it would require re-soldering but maybe, just maybe, it's not and I can just plug it up. I would've had this posted hours ago but I couldn't get on this site, then I had college. |
Guys, I'm embarrassed... Everything I've gone through, all the effort y'all have put towards helping me, was simply fixed by Fn+F11(my key combination to turn on my wireless)... For whatever reason I assumed (and I also know why they say what they say about assuming now) that the key combination wouldn't work in Slackware because I thought that the keyboard wasn't mapped out correctly for this. Just for shits-n-giggles (and I was desperate enough) I tried it and I'll be damned if it didn't work. I appreciate everyone's help but the battle is finally won.
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since this is a dead thread, before I maked it as solved I just wanted to see what the little icon showed up as when I posted using lynx instead of XP or Windows 7 like it shows far in the past.
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Don't be too hard on yourself since you did say you toggled the Fn+F11 earlier in the thread. I wonder why that worked now and didn't work earlier? Anyway, congrats on figuring it out.
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My Asus EeePC has a light for the wireless. If I disable it (Fn+F2 in this case), the light goes off (and the OS notices it happening if it was configured, and also tells me). |
I wish mine had a light for wireless. It may light up if an actual transfer is taking place but I don't remember. I have tons of lights at the bottom but the emblem that shows what they are wore off a long time ago. I even have one for Bluetooth but there isn't a Bluetooth chip in the computer and when I use a usb dongle it doesn't show up either. I probably did do something like that though, turning it back off without realising. And or the OS recognizing it, it may have if I was in X but I stayed in the console. Does yours still say something if you don't start X?
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My wireless state light comes on instantly on power-up, even before BIOS starts. I cannot turn in on/off with Fn+F2 in BIOS, but I can as soon as the Ubuntu splash screen comes up. I'll have to find out how to start Ubuntu sans-X to test that way.
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