BenTrein
9th January 2012, 04:18 AM
I had Fedora 16 running on my Dell Inspiron mini. It worked as expected, even the wifi connected out of the box. Great.
But then I used the NetworkManager (software) slide to turn the wifi of as I went on a plane.
This was a bad idea, because it turned the whole thing off for good. I fear it's fried, but I would be rather surprised by this; it's not that old a netbook. However, the software managed to turn the hardware-switch off. And there is no hardware switch on my netbook. There's the F2 button, but that doesn't work anymore either. Nothing can turn it back on; not a live usb, not a reinstall (formating the entire harddrive), not disabling the wifi in the bios and then turning it back on. Not even WinXP or Win7.
Fresh install of WinXP says it's disabled. When I enable it, it still doesn't see any networks in range. The only thing that will work is an external wifi-card on WinXP. The Fedora 16 live-usb still insists the Airplane Mode is on (which I've come to understand as the equivalent of the hardware-switch being superglued to 'off').
This is a small rant, but also a request for help. Would anyone be great enough to be able to have me turn it back on? Is there any way to find that hardware switch - in the software? I'm ready and open to using other OSes to get this going again.
And forgive me, but I hope you understand I'm quite scared of installing F16 on this machine again...
But then I used the NetworkManager (software) slide to turn the wifi of as I went on a plane.
This was a bad idea, because it turned the whole thing off for good. I fear it's fried, but I would be rather surprised by this; it's not that old a netbook. However, the software managed to turn the hardware-switch off. And there is no hardware switch on my netbook. There's the F2 button, but that doesn't work anymore either. Nothing can turn it back on; not a live usb, not a reinstall (formating the entire harddrive), not disabling the wifi in the bios and then turning it back on. Not even WinXP or Win7.
Fresh install of WinXP says it's disabled. When I enable it, it still doesn't see any networks in range. The only thing that will work is an external wifi-card on WinXP. The Fedora 16 live-usb still insists the Airplane Mode is on (which I've come to understand as the equivalent of the hardware-switch being superglued to 'off').
This is a small rant, but also a request for help. Would anyone be great enough to be able to have me turn it back on? Is there any way to find that hardware switch - in the software? I'm ready and open to using other OSes to get this going again.
And forgive me, but I hope you understand I'm quite scared of installing F16 on this machine again...
