# weird behavior with atheros mini PCIe



## taz (Jan 15, 2013)

So I have a Lenovo G560 with FreeBSD 9.0 RELEAS which came with a unsupported broadcom wifi card and I bought a half mini PCIe Atheros AR5BXB63 (AR5007EG chip set).
It works fine...when it's recognized.

Let's say I turn on my laptop and the card gets recognized then I restart the laptop and the card dose not get recognized then I restart the laptop again and the card gets recognized and so on...

Every second restart in a sequence of restarts the card would get recognized.

Any idea on what might be causing this weird behavior?


----------



## wblock@ (Jan 15, 2013)

The Lenovo BIOS only allows wireless cards with certain approved IDs to work.  But I would expect that to happen every time.


----------



## taz (Jan 15, 2013)

Yes I know about the Lenovo wifi whitelist, and I have another Atheros card that when I put I can not boot. It just show a message that the card is not supported.

But this is not the case with the current card.

Any other ideas?


----------



## m6tt (Jan 17, 2013)

Occassionally the embedded controller and/or ACPI disable the wireless without operating system intervention. It's a small stretch that perhaps this is toggling between boots?
Try press the wireless on-off function key 4-5 times, trying to connect in between. At least on my netbook, this cycles through disabling wireless, bluetooth, both or none without notifying the OS.

You may want to check dmesg for ath related messages, or other wireless related messages.

Finally, the Lenovo bios block is not that good...some machines it only affects *cold* boots. Perhaps this is the case?

If you have a WWAN pcie slot, it sometimes bypasses the check entirely.


----------

