No Airport Card Installed

Hello all,

I finally got around to setting up a wireless network and after doing so noticed that my iMac says that there is "no airport card installed." I know there is an airport card as I've used it before. I've been reading the forums with date ranges from the past year and have seen several posts about this issue, have tried many of the suggested fixes but still can't get my system to work. System profiler lists an Airport in hardware with device name en1. But in Network tab it doesn't seem to recognize the card (it is listed as an option but it won't turn on and the status bar reads "no airport card installed). Based on what I've read here I really feel like this is a software issue, not a hardware.

What I've tried (and hasn't worked): Resetting the PRAM/NVRAM, tried creating a new user account but had the same problem, tried creating a new location but new location fails to recognize airport card even exits, tried deleting preferences.plist networkinterfaces.plist etc. etc. but didn't work.

I've exhausted my limited knowledge of Mac hardware/software and was hoping someone on here could help. ANY help would be appreciated, as I am pretty frustrated at this point. Thanks in advance.

You may be able to enable or disable Airport from the command line

If for some reason you want to turn off your Airport Extreme Card from the command line, simply type:

sudo ifconfig en1 down
Where en1 is the interface for your Airport Extreme Card. en0 is usually Ethernet, and en1 is usually the Airport Extrewme card. To bring it back up, just type:

sudo ifconfig en1 up
Enjoy!

best of luck,

Greenman,

I tried as you suggested and I got the message back saying that en1 does not exist. This seems odd to me because according to my System Profiler it certainly does exist as the Airport hardware is listed as being en1.

Any more thoughts?

Found this info have you looked at this
en1 is usually the Airport connection. Ethernet is en0. Go to Network Utility in the Utilities folder of the Application folder, select information for Network interface en1 and you should see en1 connected and active with a link speed of 54MB.

Some time cleaning the caches out can fix things, the likes of OnyX, Cocktail.

Just a thought ! you didn't by chance dislodge or slacken the arial when you were messing around inside your box ! you never know do you


Found this.
Turning your Airport Card on and off
This is a simple tip I stumbled across a month or so ago. There were some bugs in Leopard wireless that wouldn’t let me connect to the encrypted wireless network at work after a machine was restarted. I found that turning the airport card on and off let me connect again. I hated having to remember this every time I restarted so I dug around and found that the command line tool networksetup can do it for me. Great!

This tool exists on Tiger machines in the Apple Remote Desktop client bundle. The path to it is:

/System/Library/CoreServices/RemoteManagement/ARDAgent.app/Contents/Support/networksetup

Fortunately they very kindly included it in the build for Leopard. The path in Leopard is:

/usr/sbin/networksetup

So, in Leopard, to turn the Airport card off enter the following in Terminal:

/usr/sbin/networksetup -setairportpower off

To turn the card back on change “off” to “on”. If you’re running Tiger make sure to change the path so it points to the app correctly.

Put both of these commands in an AppleScript, save it as an application and add it to your Login items. Then, when the machine is rebooted the card gets turned off and then on and in my case makes my wireless connection.

Snow Leopard changes
In Snow Leopard the command remains, however now you need to run it as sudo. You also need to include the actual network device name AirPort is running on. You can get that by running the following command:

/usr/sbin/networksetup -listallhardwareports

You’ll see Airport listed and below it the device. If the machine does not have two Ethernet ports AirPort is commonly listed as “en1″

After you have that you include it in your command:

sudo /usr/sbin/networksetup -setairportpower en1 on

I’ve included these changes and a routine that will find the airport device in the Snow Leopard version of the script.

Click here to download a copy of the script for Tiger/Leopard:
Airport off and on

Click here to download a copy of the script for Snow Leopard:
Snow Leopard Airport off and on

networksetup is a great tool for administrators and even just people who want a little more control over their machines.

I'll keep looking for info on this, best of luck with it.

Just out of curiosity where did you get your computer? I bought mine off of ebay and have the same problem. Mine did it right out of the box new. Hardware shows airport extreme is there but not showing up. I first asked at&t to help and told me to go to apple.Apple tried over the phone and ended up making me an appointment at an apple store. None of the techs could figure it out. So I had to leave it there.

Hello, I didn't read through all of the posts so I don't know if this will help solve this mystery.

I think this is a hardware problem.

My computer has the same symptoms as yours but I am not sure the problems have a common cause. I think my computer is affected with a hardware issue for a certain reason. Note that my computer also says "No airport card installed" and when I tried to fix it, I verified permissions and reset the PRAM. I have the Feb-2011 Macbook PRO.

About a week after I bought this computer, I installed Windows on it. It has all the proper updates and I have been using windows and mac regularly. Windows also cannot find the airport card. The windows version of the Network Control Panel says there are no internet connections avialable, but I live on a college campus and I am surrounded by wireless networks. The fact that both my windows operating system and my mac operating systems have been affected by the same problem on the same day lead me to believe this is a hardware issue.

Or am I wrong? I used bootcamp to partition my harddrive, and from what I understand it is impossible to write information between operating systems without the installation of software that can read from both disk formats. I never installed that type of software on this computer.

This computer had a hardware issue earlier. The screen would flick off in mid-use. The problem lasted for two days and then went away by itself, seemingly, and I haven't had it since.

Is it just me or do the new Macbook Pros have a ton of hardware issues?

Love you guys, Bach