Chosen Solution
Hello guys :) At first: sorry for my bad english…i’m german. I have a big issue with my MacBook 13" Unibody 2,0 Ghz. A few weeks ago i damaged the connector from the iSight, Bluetooth & Airport Cable that goes to the Mainboard. So i bought a new one and everything works exept the Airport. I thought i have damaged my old Airport card through my repair-session so i bought a new airport card from ebay. The seller from the card meant that the card isn’t new but has 100% functionality. But after i replaced the new airpord card with the new one i still have no connectivity. OS X said, that “no airport-card is installed”. Resetting PRAM and the other solutions doesn’t work. Windows 7 via BootCamp still doesn’t find a wifi-card too in the device manager. So what can be the issue? Maybe the new card is damaged too? Or the connector that connects the airport card with the cable that i written? And when the airport card is the issue….can it be only the card or maybe the card + the antennas there next to the card? One other small question? the cable that i plugged in the card has at one side a small white dot on it…in which direction the dot should looked to? to the user (away from the lcd) or to the lcd panel? I hope anyone understand what i want to ask ;) Greetings
Look at the connector that plugs into the airport card under the display clutch cover. If you can see two sideways “U” shapes you have the cable plugged in backwards and have most likely damaged your motherboard. In my experience plugging it in the wrong way once and powering on the unit will damage the motherboard causing the airport to stop working. The only fix I know is to replace the board. Sorry.
You should see two ‘U’ marks on the cable. Point those toward the Airport card when inserting the cable into the Airport card. If it’s not showing up, and you’re really sure both Airport cards are good, you’re looking at either that cable, or the logic board. EDIT: Sorry, I took a while to answer. Agreeing with Tim.
Picture Here you go, it is the little resistor in the middle of the picture. To the left of the brown bigger resistor. There are two right next to each other.
zemsantos- Everyone with experience on this has posted that connecting the Airport board the wrong way will likely damage your logic board such that wifi will no longer work. Your symptoms seem to match this. You have 2 options- buy another Airport board just in case the logic board is actually okay, or buy a little USB wifi adapter and use that instead. There are USB wifi adapters that sit almost completely flush against the side of the notebook, so that’s not a bad option at all. The trick is to make sure you buy a compatible adapter. Here are some links I had gathered on this, my Airport board replacement ended up working so I didn’t try an adapter, but the info might help you- https://discussions.apple.com/thread/407… https://discussions.apple.com/thread/270… http://www.insanelymac.com/forum/index.p… Airlink driver for Realtek RTL8188SU: http://www.airlink101.com/support/index…. http://airlink101.com/download/download_…
Same issue. I ended up buying 4 replacement wifi modules to get the wifi working. The cards I bought also were tested and had 100% functionality. What occurs to me now, is that the macbook pro A1278 does not have plug and play hardware functionality. In other words, if you’re swapping or adding new hardware.. it might not show up instantly as new hardware on the osx. What could work is a reinstall of osx after you’ve added the new hardware. Sounds bizzar, but worth a shot. If you want to go with another solution for wifi without having a huge dongle sticking out of your usb port, you should try the Eye-Fi SD cards. Basically an SD card that also has wifi on it. It’ll pop into your SD slot and be hidden from view. Hope this helps, good luck
After making the same mistake as Sinfin i ended up without wifi. Initially the computer turned on when i plugged the power cord and every time i tried to shut down he would start up again. After plugging the wifi cable correctly it stopped doing that. Is there no way to diagnose if the logic board is damaged or not? Besides buying a new wifi card… :-| Update The solution i found was this usb wifi card: http://www.belkin.com/us/F7D2102-Belkin/… With this drivers: http://www.realtek.com/downloads/downloa… I’m using LION 10.7.5 and works like a charm. No issues at all, installed the drivers plug the card and in seconds had wireless internet AGAIN after so many months :-D.
