EDIT: This is an ongoing problem. I didn’t want to create a brand new thread for it. My recent updates are in my most recent thread reply. Please help!!!
So I bought a used X220 for my dad. Great little laptop except for one problem so far. About half the time when it boots, it fails to recognize the Intel wireless adapter. Sometimes the adapter doesn’t show up at all under device manager. Sometimes the adapter shows up, but is inoperable and under its device status says “The device could not be started (code 10). The device could not be found.” If it does work, it does so for about 90 seconds before dropping out and again failing to recognize the adapter. It seems this is a recognized issue in Windows 10 with the Intel 6205. What on earth is going on, and how can I remedy this?
I have the tablet version of this very laptop. Just in the past couple of hours I was dealing with a similar issue.
I don't know if this is the problem you're actually having, but sometimes with Lenovo laptops, the mPCIe slots for the wifi card are whitelisted for certain cards that Lenovo approves for use. I know that doesn't really make sense since presumably the card came with the laptop, but hear me out -
I would suggest checking which BIOS version the laptop has and updating it to the latest version if it isn't the latest version for that laptop - there is a modified version of the BIOS out there I can link to which solves some problems that stock lenovo versions had but that were never officially patched. It also gets rid of the whitelist so that any wireless card can be used.
Again, it's just an idea, and probably won't solve the problem - it may be the contacts on the card itself. Try opening the laptop and reseating the card (it should be underneath the keyboard and palm rest).
Tried re-seating the card. Contacts look clean and good. Tried to update the BIOS, but since this laptop isn't officially supported for Windows 10 (You kidding me Lenovo? It's from like 2011. Step it up.) the Windows 10 BIOS update utility won't work and the Win 8.1 wont work on Win10. Ugh.
... Now it's showing under device manager, two separate devices. 6205 and 6205 #2. Odd.
Still no options to connect to Wi-Fi. The first device has a Code 31 (THis device is not woring properly because Windows cannot load the drivers required for this device.) The other claims it's working correctly, but it's clearly not.
Edit: Ran the Win 10 troubleshooting utility. Number 2 under device manager now shows Code 10 (This device cannot start. This device does not exist.)
Edit 2: I'm going to partition the drive in half and install Win 8.1. This has been a clean Win 10 install, so it's wasted time, but no data is at risk. We'll see what happens then.
I've had that happen with cards that have more than one TX/RX pair, I believe it's just Windows being dumb and thinking each pair is a separate card. I have a TP Link Archer T8E that Windows thought was three separate cards for a little while.
Anyways, the only real advice I can offer is to try out different drivers from Intel's website. Microsoft's automatic drivers are not the greatest, but Intel generally keeps their drivers in decent shape.
Unfortunately that hasn't yielded results. I've tried 10 or 15 different iterations of the ProSet driver, which seems to be the one for these adapters.
Could you kindly link to that? I'm running out of ideas.
In device manager, I'm seeing a PCI Serial Port under the Other Devices section. Maybe that's the port that should be recognizing this card? Is this what your experience was like?
And now that I have Windows 8.1 on the machine I was able to update the BIOS to the most recent supplied by Lenovo. Still no dice with the WiFi and still showing a PCI Serial Port in the Device Manager. Perhaps worth noting the Bluetooth works.
So it does not work in either version of windows? How about if you spin up a linux distro, you'll know if it's hardware or software. The same wireless card has worked flawlessly in my T430s for the longest time under Mint 17.3.
Ps: I'm pretty sure that card is white listed in bios. Unfortunately it does not seem to show the wireless card in bios, only the internal lan connection.
Here's the thread in the bios-mods forum that links to the download. I've used this on my own X220 to get rid of potential BIOS restrictions and it did work for me - it also gets rid of arbitrary memory speed restrictions so you can put 1866MHz memory in it, but that's just an added perk x3
also, mods, if this goes against the Forum Rules against
I have no idea why, or how, but it now works. I took out the Wireless card and tried to seat it in the 2nd (longer) PCI slot under the palm-rest. Booted, and nothing worked. So I re-seated it in its original slot, booted, and now the WiFi is working great. Perhaps it was a bad connection to the PCI slot, perhaps a bad connection to one of the antennae that sent it awry. I had re-seated the card before, but this time it worked.
So it wasn't as simple as I thought. I had it running stable for about 15 minutes, then it ate it again.
So I took the Intel 7260 card out of my daily driver laptop and popped it in, and that card was blacklisted. I installed the 1.43 BIOS update and the modification (From deeper in that same thread you linked. Thank you for that.). Booted it, and it's been stable for about 30 minutes. I'm typing from it right now. I've rebooted a handful of time, disconnected and reconnected to various WiFi networks, put the computer to sleep and into hibernation, and installed a couple programs. Seems to be finally working. That suggests to me that the issue was with the old 6205 card, but since I changed so many things at once it's very difficult to be sure. I'm unwilling to pop the old card back in here and check, especially since this card has far superior network performance.
Anyway. This was a shit show. Thanks for the help.
Posting here again to see if anybody has any further advice.
I just talked to my dad on the phone. Apparently whatever I did failed to actually fix the problems. Here are a couple thoughts.
1) I've heard some people saying that these cards with combined wi-fi and bluetooth can create issues. The bluetooth on his laptop seems to be working fine. Could disabling the bluetooth help somehow?
2) Could getting a card to go in the second mini PCI slot (the longer one) solve this? If it were an issue with the motherboard, what are the odds it's affecting both the mini PCI slots?