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My wireless connection speed only crawled, but when connected, very fast. With the help of a community member, I thought I had it fixed by installing ndiswrapper, downloading .inf driver file (windows driver for my computer), and various other tweaks which I had no business attempting on my own after I thought it was fixed. Long story short, I messed up and cannot find any networks, wireless seems gone altogether, and wlan0 does not appear. On shutdown, I also notice a flash of firmware missing, or something like that.

Am not sure what all I should provide, so if any other pastes would be of help i will provide them.

http://pastebin.com/WLLF7FpE

Details: OS Ubuntu 13.10 Memory 5.3 GiB Processor AMD A6-3400M APU with Radeon(tm) HD Graphics × 4 Gallium 0.4 on AMD SUMO OS Type 64-bit Disk 732.5 GB

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  • Does your wireless spring to life if you do, in a terminal: sudo modprobe ndiswrapper
    – chili555
    Jan 10, 2014 at 20:38
  • no. comes back with "FATAL: Module ndiswrapper not found".
    – user233824
    Jan 10, 2014 at 20:58
  • i tried to reverse some of the things i did and, thus, have made a mess so far beyond me
    – user233824
    Jan 10, 2014 at 21:06

1 Answer 1

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Please reinstall the ndiswrapper suite. From a terminal:

sudo apt-get install --reinstall ndiswrapper-common ndiswrapper-utils-1.9 dkms

Now see if you can load the module:

sudo modprobe ndiswrapper

Check for informative messages:

dmesg | grep ndis

If the module still cannot be found, compile ndiswrapper from source. With a temporary wired ethernet connection:

sudo apt-get install linux-headers-generic build-essential

If one or both are already installed, please proceed. Download this file to your desktop: http://sourceforge.net/projects/ndiswrapper/files/stable/ndiswrapper-1.59.tar.gz/download Right-click it and select 'Extract Here.' Now back to the terminal:

cd ~/Desktop/ndiswrapper-1.59
make
sudo make install
sudo modprobe ndiswrapper

Now is it working? Check:

ndiswrapper -l
iwconfig

Reload the Windows XP .inf file. Find out where it is; assuming it's in a folder on your desktop:

cd ~/Desktop/WindoowsDrivers  <--or wherever the original .inf is located
sudo ndiswrapper -i <some_file>.inf  <--or whatever the file is named
sudo modprobe -r ndiswrapper && sudo modprobe ndiswrapper

Check:

ndiswrapper -l
iwconfig

Please be sure that rt2800pci is not loaded:

lsmod | grep rt2

If it is loaded, unload it and blacklist it:

sudo -i
modprobe -r rt2800pci
echo "blacklist rt2800pci"  >>  /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf
exit

Is yours a 64-bit install?

arch

If so, you will have difficulty getting ndiswrapper to work at all and even if you do, you need an x64 .inf file. If you decide to reinstall, I will be happy to help you troubleshoot the native driver rt2800pci.

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  • seemed to reinstall perfectly, but second cmd returned, "sudo modprobe ndiswrapper FATAL: Module ndiswrapper not found."
    – user233824
    Jan 10, 2014 at 21:43
  • Please check for informative messages as in my answer.
    – chili555
    Jan 10, 2014 at 22:07
  • not sure if i am understanding, but the last cmd output is "brandt@Brandtsys:~$ dmesg | grep ndis brandt@Brandtsys:~$" nothing. do you mean for me to copy the output of first cmd?
    – user233824
    Jan 10, 2014 at 22:16
  • Please do so; paste it here and give us the link in your reply: paste.ubuntu.com
    – chili555
    Jan 10, 2014 at 22:22
  • here is the link paste.ubuntu.com/6729228
    – user233824
    Jan 10, 2014 at 22:27

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