Atheros AR5001 wireless card "wireless is disabled by hardware switch"

I'll add to this that this specific laptop was my own, and worked back in an old version of Ubuntu, possibly 7.10-8.04 or thereabouts. I'm thinking this may be related to NetworkManager, and will work through https://wiki.ubuntu.com/DebuggingNetworkManager to rule it in or out.

Sorry I also forgot that in Windows 7, they state this wireless card as an Atheros AR5007 (I dunno if this helps at all)
Thanks guys

network-manager start/stop and kernel driver load/unload tested (syslog)
hardware button tested (syslog1)
rfkill checked (command 1)
Also, tried full instructions at Hotkeys/Troubleshooting in case it was the Hardware button itself. It was tested with udev and acpi_listen and there is no event for the button, so could be that the kernel is not initiating an event to NetworkManager or X to kick the wifi in.

Could try wpa_supplicant but need instructions on how to do this - any simple instructions welcome (WEP 64 hex key), i.e. how to kick it to connect manually, although I don't know the commands.

udev tested as per Hotkeys/Troubleshooting - no events for button

Mainline kernel amd64 v3.0-rc7 tested too, no change in the situation.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Tested by xteejx directly

I have sent this bug upstream directly to the kernel developers, considering the regression nature of this bug report, and that there is a lot of information here, and many things tried and tested.
https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=40102 < kernel bug report can be seen here and commented on
Please keep an eye on the kernel bug report and check in on it from time to time to see how it is progressing, or if there is any more information needed by them. Give as much as info you can when you reply as you have here. More information is better than no information.

Ok, so the problem is definitely not the mainline kernel, but could still be our patches.
The laptop has been tested with a live DVD of Sabayon linux with kernel 2.6.31-sabayon #1 on i686 arch, it is based on gentoo 2.0.1, and uses GNOME 2.28.0.
Will try to test other distros to narrow down the issue.

It looks like the rfkilli s the problem. I see Matthew Garrett already suggested you try unblocking it. Am I understanding correctly that when you unblock both 0 and 1 it works temporarily, but a short time later it stops working again and displays a soft block on the hp-wifi device? It might be best if you just pasted in the output from 'rfkill list' after it stops working again.

Hello Seth,

I will try this a bit later on when I am at home and can connect it to the internet via wire :D

Hi Seth, thanks for looking at this.
It appears that rfkill may indeed be the problem, but the situation is that rfkill works first time only if the laptop was rebooted from windows.
After that, rfkill unblock {0,1} works, but yes, temporarily, as the local APs are displayed in network-manager, but then rfkill HARD blocks/kills the wireless button (hp-wifi) after about 10-30 seconds.
No amount of messing around with the rfkill options works.

And I can answer the above question (forgive the syntax it's from memory, but the text is correct). After it stops working again (after the unblock suggested by M Garrett), rfkill list shows something like this:

0: hp-wifi Hard blocked: yes
                   Soft blocked: no

1: phy0 Hard blocked: no
                   Soft blocked: no

And yes, the device number shown for phy0 changes from 4 to 1 after working, it is not a typing error.

Hello again, I though I would try and use a USB wireless dongle. It was a ralink RT2070 (device ID - 148f:2070), but for some strange reason it came up with "device is disabled by hardware switch". So I decided to do "rfkill unblock all" and sure enough my laptop wireless was unblocked and the usb dongle was unblocked, so I tried to use my laptop wireless and it connect and disconnect 3 or 4 times, then went back to hardblock.

I will attach some log files just in case you need them, but I think that it may not be any wireless card problem but the laptop itself as ubuntu says that the ralink dongle is disabled by hardware switch, which isn't possible

Thanks guys

Denva: Can you give the output of 'rfkill list' when you get the situation with the USB adapter?

Teej: It would be most helpful to have the rfkill list output pasted in rather than typed from memory, just to ensure that there aren't any mistakes.

What it looks like at this point is that hp_wmi receives events from the BIOS that it thinks are telling it that some kind of blocks have been applied to the wireless. Exactly why that is happening is unclear at this point.

Oh, and if you want to work around the problem temporarily the easiest thing to do is to unload the hp_wmi module (sudo rmmod hp_wmi). You can make it persist across reboots by adding the line 'blacklist hp_wmi' to /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf. You will loose some functionality however, probably most noticeable is support for hotkeys.

Hello and thanks Seth, I can't uoad the rfkill as my laptop overheated and am currently writing this on my blackberry. But when I did do the rfkill it said the same thing as last time (stated above).

I also tried the work around and after following your instructions my wireless card was picking up networks but wouldn't connect to them. Then we done disabled the network and turned it back on and it came up with "disabled by hardware switch". And haven't been able to get it to search for networks again.

One last thing I did blacklist hp_wmi, but I think I have undone all of it again

Thanks again for your help, this problem is getting annoying lol

This affects me too.

When I woke up this morning, heard my laptop fan running because of a dialog box that needed attention, which in itself to me is a bug.

Even though I had my ethernet cable plugged into the laptop, it was still trying to reconnect to a wifi network in the house, and there is no telling how long this dialog box had been up, causing my cpu to run hotter.

So I pressed the physical wifi button on my laptop (which I never use, because I've always perceived it as not working in Ubuntu), as an attempt to turn off the wifi card temporarily, until I was actually away from my wired connection at home.

Then I did today's system updates (via Synaptic), which seemed to include a new kernel (?), and shut off the laptop, since it needed to be rebooted for the update, and I was leaving for work anyway.

Once at work, I started the laptop again, and now I have the "wireless is disabled by a hardware switch" issue.

Ubuntu 11.04 amd64 is the only OS on my machine, can't do anything with Windows. Don't know if this situation is related to running the updates this morning, or solely from pressing the physical wifi button on my Compaq Presario CQ60-215DX laptop.

sudo rfkill unblock all doesn't fix anything
sudo rrmod hp_wmi doesn't seem to fix anything either, though the module is now unloaded
forcing my grub2 menu and booting with an older kernel doesn't seem to do anything either

Denva: Will you run the following commands in a terminal and attache the *.dsl files that are generated?

  sudo apt-get install fwts
  sudo fwts --disassemble-aml

Anthropornis: I can't tell whether your problem is really the same. I'd assume you've tried this, but since you didn't mention it specifically -- pressing the wifi button doesn't unblock your wireless? Can you provide the output of 'rfkill list' before and after pressing the button?

Sorry for the delay, yes I had tried to just press the physical wifi button but it did not work (it worked quite well to start this whole mess though).

I had actually managed to remove, I think the HP driver, from the kernel, and that was a decent workaround. Then I received my new laptop, and I've not been using the affected the laptop lately. If I get a chance I will try to retrace my steps and put the (driver?) back into the kernel and test rfkill list.

Solution from: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1805960

sudo rfkill unblock all

Speaking to the OP, this does not work, as explained above.
This was tried way back when with "sudo rfkill unblock all" and it worked
for
about 5 minutes until the user tried to connect to an AP, but then the
hp-wifi
(I can only assume) kicked back in and hard blocked everything.