I'm helping a friend that can't connect to the internet through a hard wired connection or through wireless. It's a laptop, that usually connected fine through both.
The error is that the WiFi bars have a red X. If you click on it, it says "Not Connected. No Connections are available"
It's a windows 7 OS machine. Here are the steps I have tried:
- Made sure hardware switches are turned ON on the side of the laptop (no switches found)
- Pressed the toggle on the keyboard to make sure it wasn't accidentally turned off (toggle didn't seem to toggle anything)
- Checked Device Manager for yellow exclamation points (none found)
- Clicked WiFi bars in System Tray, then "Troubleshoot" then got the message: An unexpected error has occurred. The troubleshooting wizard can't continue.
- Went to network adapters. LAN and WiFi say Unplugged and Not connected
- Tried disabling and re-enabling WiFi adapter (still doesn't work)
- In network adapters pressed "Diagnose", got: An error occurred while loading the troubleshooter
- Ran
sfc /scannow
from elevated Command Prompt. After a certain % it stopped and said: Windows Resource Protection could not perform the requested operation - Run
chkdsk /r
, pressedy
, thenenter
, then restarted computer. Let Chkdsk run for a few hours, came back to find Windows at the login screen. - Try
sfc /scannow
again. Same error as before. - Uninstalled both network adapters, pressed Action > Scan For Hardware Changes. Still doesn't work
I'm out of ideas. What else could this be.
EDIT (for bounty)
I keep trying the same things as listed above, hoping something will just magically work, but it's proven unsuccessful. I've done everything I could possibly think of. I know the best solution would be "Just reinstall Windows", but right now that's not a possibility.
Best Answer
I had a somewhat similar issue with a Win 7 machine a while back. It wasn't wireless just wired but it was having this same issue.
After doing close to the same steps that you have done, I did these things:
In my case it was simply that Windows Update had installed the newest driver for the NIC and I needed to rollback to a Vista version of the driver. Unfortunately, I am not intelligent enough to explain the reason that the 'updated' version of the driver failed.
Also, SFC failing may be some foreshadowing of a larger problem or it could actually be the problem.
Good Luck!