"No wifi hardware" mid-2011 iMac problem

I'm trying to repurpose a used mid-2011 iMac 21.5" for some people and am having some issues with the internal wireless adapter. I booted to an external drive that has different copies of OS X (have used this many times to restore machines from the cloned images on it), and upon restoring this machine to a 10.11 clone, I was unable to get the wireless card to show up at all on either the desktop or inside networking preferences. I restored again to 10.11, same issue. So I tried 10.10, and again, same issue. The odd thing is that while booted from the external drive, it works perfectly, so I know the actual hardware is good, but for some reason it's not working when booted to the internal hard drive. Everything else on the machine works fine. Could it be that the HDD is going bad? It would seem odd that only one component would be having issues, but I am no Mac expert so I wanted to see if someone on here had either seen this before or might know how to fix it. Any help is appreciated.

G'day and welcome to the forums≥

Is the Airport Card actually installed. There is no 'adapter' inbuilt just the Airport card and lkike everything electronic the do fail.

Try both NVRAM, and SMC resets, see here, https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204063, for the NVRAM reset procedure, also the link to the SMC reset procedure is on that page as well.

harryb2448 said:

G'day and welcome to the forums≥

Is the Airport Card actually installed. There is no 'adapter' inbuilt just the Airport card and lkike everything electronic the do fail.

Click to expand...

ferrarr said:

Try both NVRAM, and SMC resets, see here, https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204063, for the NVRAM reset procedure, also the link to the SMC reset procedure is on that page as well.

Click to expand...

It seems a bit odd that as the OP satiated: "while booted from the external drive, it works perfectly,"

Maybe time for a OS X reinstall or maybe run a Combo Update.

PS: What does the "System Info" say about any wireless devices from the About This Mac > More info…




- Patrick
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