working wireless card stopped working on previously working wireless Ubuntu 11.04

[Abhishek Dixit]

On Mon, Jan 16, 2012 at 10:44 AM, Abhishek Dixit <abhidixit87 at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Sun, Jan 15, 2012 at 8:25 PM, Colin Law <clanlaw at googlemail.com> wrote:
>> On 15 January 2012 14:10, Abhishek Dixit <abhidixit87 at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> On Sun, Jan 15, 2012 at 4:40 PM, Colin Law <clanlaw at googlemail.com> wrote:
>>>> On 15 January 2012 04:04, Abhishek Dixit <abhidixit87 at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>>> I have a Dell Laptop on which wireless and every thing used to work
>>>>> perfectly.Today morning I noticed the suddenly there is no wireless at
>>>>> all. On a working condition I used to have folllowing
>>>>>
>>>>> lspci -vnn
>>>>>
>>>>> 0c:00.0 Network controller [0280]: Broadcom Corporation BCM4312
>>>>> 802.11b/g LP-PHY [14e4:4315] (rev 01)
>>>>>    Subsystem: Dell Wireless 1397 WLAN Mini-Card [1028:000c]
>>>>>    Flags: bus master, fast devsel, latency 0, IRQ 17
>>>>>    Memory at f69fc000 (64-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=16K]
>>>>>    Capabilities: <access denied>
>>>>>    Kernel driver in use: wl
>>>>>    Kernel modules: wl, ssb
>>>>> and
>>>>>
>>>>> /etc/lsb-release
>>>>> Ubuntu 11.04 64 bit
>>>>> Module in use was wl.ko But now all of a sudden it fails to load any
>>>>> module for wireless.I have no idea why this happened.I am a SOHO user
>>>>> who does not have any thing other than web surfing and multimedia to
>>>>> do on this machine.I even booted from a Live USB but still wireless
>>>>> here failed to work (prior to installation same Live USB was able to
>>>>> detect the wifi card and wireless worked with this live USB). The
>>>>> driver in use was found on the LIVE cd at following location
>>>>>
>>>>> pool/restricted/b/bcmwl/bcmwl-kernel-source_5.100.82.38+bdcom-0ubuntu3_amd64.deb
>>>>> which used to show as additional drivers available for
>>>>> installation.Now this option even does not come when I boot with this
>>>>> Live USB.Since the installation of Ubuntu I have kept this Live USB as
>>>>> a backup. Can some one help here?
>>>>
>>>> If it no longer works with the live USB, but used to, and you have not
>>>> changed anything on the USB stick then it must be a change on the
>>>> laptop hardware or bios.  I presume that if there is a hardware switch
>>>> that it is switched on.  Check in the BIOS settings that it has not
>>>> got switched off there.  Is it setup for dual boot with windows?  If
>>>> so does it work there?
>>>>
>>> It is not a dual boot system.There is only Ubuntu 11.04 now I
>>> formatted it completely with 11.10 but the same situation persists.
>>
>> That is not surprising given that it no longer works with the Live
>> USB, so it is something on the laptop that has changed or broken.  You
>> didn't answer the other issues.
>> Is there a hardware switch for the wifi.
> There is a hardware switch but I am very sure that it is not turned
> off Since bluetooth icon is there and
> other bluetooth devices can detect my laptop.
>
>> Have you checked in the BIOS to see if anything there mentions wifi?
> I did check bios but there is no such option to disable wifi .
>
Yes I have seen and wifi there is not switched off.

I noticed this problem started since I did suspend and resume of my
laptop i.e. close the flap of laptop and then reopen it.It is this
time that laptop gets suspended and and resume again.

After this I erased entire Ubuntu 11.10 from my system and did a clean install.
Installed STA driver from the additional drivers section.After this
got my wireless  working.But I as soon as I close the flap of laptop
and then reopen it again the connectivity goes and rfkill list command
shows

rfkill list
0: brcmwl-0: Wireless LAN
	Soft blocked: no
Hard blocked: yes

and then onwards I can not connect to any kind of wireless network.I
did not switched off the wifi button as rfkill command above shows
Hard blocked.
Now I do a reboot and then wait for some time.First attempt to connect
to available wireless network fails.After some time it is able to
connect.
and this time rfkill list shows

rfkill list
0: dell-wifi: Wireless LAN
	Soft blocked: no
	Hard blocked: no

I have not at all touched the hardware wifi switch.If you notice
closing the laptop flap while working and reopening causes this
problem.This seems to be some problem in STA driver power management
module.