WiFi won't work after disk transplant to identical machine

ICIT2LOL said:

Interesting, I used your link in post #2 to find the ones I posted.

Hum thanks Derek I just ended up at what looked like dead end to me but anyway they were found that is all that matters eh?

Must be getting a bit rusty I reckon been a lot going on just lately.

I had to click on the show more at the bottom of the initial list displayed to see them all,

Update. No joy so far.

I tried uninstalling the "devices" in Device Manager that I was complaining about, then rebooting. It just tries to install the same things and ends up in the identical state.

I used NirSoft's regscanner to find registry references to the wifi card. There were several, including the wifi card from the dead machine.

I tried installing the wifi drivers and software that derekimo suggested from Intel Wireless LAN (bg, abg, abgn) for Windows 7 (32-bit, 64-bit), Vista (32-bit, 64-bit), XP - ThinkPad - Lenovo Support (US) . This did install the Intel software. Not clear if it actually installed any drivers, but the Intel software complains that there is no wifi to configure, and the Device Manager reported driver for the wifi device is still the same microsoft one from 2009 (the download was from 2012, iirc). Still reported the wifi device as "#2."

I did discover a way to fix the "#2" problem, thanks to this web page: Remove Old Drivers After Upgrading to New Hardware which tells me to set an env variable before running device manager, namely,

Code:

SET DEVMGR_SHOW_NONPRESENT_DEVICES=1

Then, device manager shows devices that are not currently present. The previous wifi card was in this list, so I uninstalled it. After that, no more "#2."

However, that did not fix the problem. The Intel wifi software did now at least allow me to "troubleshoot" the connection, but when it tried, it said there is no wifi.

I have not yet installed the chipset drivers.

In general, I am not that keen about downloading random drivers, because there can be dependencies that I'm not aware of, and an outfit like Lenovo is not going to be careful enough about preventing me from shooting myself in the foot. Lenovo does have a "system update" feature, mimicking windows update, that is probably a better way to do it -- let it analyze my system first. I don't like that Lenovo system because it is clunky and keeps installing call-home features and scheduled nonsense, but I may yet go that route.

So, here are things that I will try next:

1. Do a fresh install of win 7 on another identical machine. (I currently have 3 of these.) That will at least prove that win 7 can work the wifi on these machines. It certainly worked on the old machine, but who knows. Slightly different hardware, maybe different BIOS, maybe older rev of the wifi card...

2. Try the chipset drivers.

3. Try the Lenovo system update feature.

4. Reinstall win 7 and start from scratch. I hate this option because the amount of reinstallation of software is enormous, taking about a week to complete. This is why I am trying to now only install "portable" software, avoiding the rat's nest of the windows registry.

5. Transplant the old wifi card into the new machine. (This will, however, at best fix only one machine of the 3, unless I want to stay with win xp forever.)

Any further suggestions would be welcome.

--peter

You MUST install the chipset driver before the wifi.
And the driver is on your comp, just looked it up on mine

Roy

@torchwood: Ok, thanks. I'll do that. I already know "the" driver is on my computer. The problem is not that I don't have the driver, the problem is not that the driver is not associated with the wifi device. The problem is that nothing believes that the wifi device does anything. So, I am not sanguine that installing the chipset driver will do anything different, I'll still try it.

I think the most likely explanation of my problem is that due to a few hardware differences: no wwan, yes fingerprint reader, when I transplanted the disk, the boot process was confused in analyzing the hardware. Now, it's possible that I'm missing drivers for something, so I'll try.

Ok, I uninstalled the broken devices, and the losing wifi device, in device manager.

I downloaded and ran the chipset driver installation. I rebooted.

No joy.

In fact, it took about 5 minutes of the wifi card not even being considered a network controller before it finally decided it was willing to load the same old driver, resulting in the same identical state as before, which is to say 3 "other" devices with no driver, the wifi card with the MS driver from 2009, and no operability.

--peter

Another update:

I transplanted my disk from the dead machine into another of the identical machines (actually a clone of that disk). Exact same losing behavior.

So, I unpacked a new HD, and I did a fresh install of Win 7 in the other identical machine. Wifi works great!!!

I installed win 7 from an enterprise full version standalone dvd, no service pack, no Lenovo nonsense, no hidden system partitions to find Lenovo drivers, etc. -- it was a brand new disk.

So, this proves that it is not a hardware problem, and it is not a problem of needing to update drivers, or missing drivers. It's some kind of misconfiguration problem.

Next, the question is whether anyone can help me figure out what the difference is between the losing installation and the good one. Of course the losing installation has tons of other software installed that I do not want to have to reinstall. On the other hand, that will make doing a diff of registries difficult. In addition, there is always the chance that some brain-damaged Lenovo or MS software decided to hardwire in the MAC address of the wifi card. MS does a lot of weird stuff with their DB system that caused me endless woe due to the DB depending on HD sector size, so going to a new 4k sector disk broke everything using the DB, such as windows update. (I mention that only as an example of extremely stupid MS design.)

Any further suggestions?

Thanks.

--peter

Maybe I should mention one other wrinkle. Of the 3 live machines I am working with, I don't think they all have the same rev of the BIOS. I doubt it, but maybe it's related to that. (Note that wifi always worked with win xp, though, on all 3 machines.)

BTW, on the machine with the fresh install of Win 7, where the wifi works just fine, Device Manager also reports the same devices as "other" with no drivers. So, I doubt those are the problem on the machine with the transplanted disk, unless some win 7 update that has not been done to the fresh install would break wifi.

I haven't solved my problem yet, but for anyone who might be interested, the unknown "PCI Memory Controller" turns out to have hardware ID PCI\VEN_8086&DEV_444E&SUBSYS_444E8086&REV_01, which is Intel "Turbo Memory," described here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Turbo_Memory
It is a 1GB on-motherboard flash, like SSD, but obviously only 1 GB.