Pete Phillips

NHS lab-rat & pianist.

HP Pavilion dm3 wifi card stopped working - SOLVED

1 minute read

Today my HP Pavilion DM3 running Ubuntu 10.10 lost internet connectivity. It soon became clear that the system didn’t even think I had wifi capability as the Network manager had “Enable Wireless” grayed out.

Trying to enable using ifconfig

ifconfig wlan0 up

gave me this:

SIOCSIFFLAGS: Operation not possible due to RF-kill

Seems that something has killed the wifi radio, and the switch on the RHS of the machine made no difference.

Found this post https://answers.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gnome-nettool/+question/132854

Let’s see what the system thinks ….

% rfkill list 
0: hp-wifi: Wireless LAN     Soft blocked: yes     Hard blocked: yes 
1: phy0: Wireless LAN     Soft blocked: yes     Hard blocked: yes 
2: hp-bluetooth: Bluetooth     Soft blocked: yes     Hard blocked: yes

Which probably explained the lack of any wifi access!

I tried the recommended command:

rfkill unblock all

which gave me:

0: hp-wifi: Wireless LAN     Soft blocked: yes     Hard blocked: yes 
1: phy0: Wireless LAN     Soft blocked: no     Hard blocked: yes 
2: hp-bluetooth: Bluetooth     Soft blocked: yes     Hard blocked: yes

Next up - try the help command:

% rfkill -h 
Usage:  rfkill [options] command 
Options:     --version   show version (0.4) 
Commands:     
    help     
    event     
    list [IDENTIFIER]     
    block IDENTIFIER     
    unblock IDENTIFIER 
where IDENTIFIER is the index no. of an rfkill switch or one of:      
    all wifi wlan bluetooth uwb ultrawideband wimax wwan gps fm

So I tried this:

rfkill unblock wifi

which worked:

0: hp-wifi: Wireless LAN     Soft blocked: no     Hard blocked: no 
1: phy0: Wireless LAN     Soft blocked: no     Hard blocked: no 
2: hp-bluetooth: Bluetooth     Soft blocked: yes     Hard blocked: no

Phew. For a while I thought that my wifi card was knackered and I’d have to ship my 2 month old laptop back to HP.

Comments

cevarief 2012-05-27 07:23:08

Hi, i didn’t think it would be that simple to turn on dm3 wifi card on linux. Thanks a lot for posting this solution.

Now i can see the blue lamp in wifi button :D

mauricio 2012-06-07 02:09:33

hey its me… i just wanted to thank you for fixing my laptop… put ubuntu on a flashdrive and im back in action…

thank you

p.s. i had to use the index number

commands used

rfkill list
rfkill unblock all 
rfkill unblock 0
rfkill unblock all"

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