I have a 17" Early 2008 Macbook Pro running lion 10.7.2. And about 3 weeks ago, this problem started occurring where my interent would stop working randomly. I go to toggle the Wi-Fi on and off, but when I try to turn Wi-fi on, it does nothing and the wifi icon remains an empty wedge.
Trying to turn Wi-Fi on from System preferences also does nothing - same empty signal.
But if I restart my Mac I can get on Wi-Ffi normally and it will last from a couple hours to a couple minutes till it drops again and I need to restart to get back on.
I searched all over the web for a solution and tried to
- reordering wifi above the other service in System Preferences
- deleting 'SystemConfiguration' folder in under library>preferences
- reinstalling Lion from recovery disk
- Reset PRAM
- Reset SMC
Nothing works. And I haven't found anyone on the web with the same problem.
Has anyone seen this problem before? Is it a Lion issue? Or is it hardware, like a messed up airport card?
Any help would be so greatly appreciated.
UPDATE
For anyone else who may stumble upon this issue, I've been dealing with this issue for a couple weeks and took it to the genius bar. After having me completely wipe my harddrive and do a fresh install of the OS and manual install of all my programs, It is conclusively a hardware problem. And the fix is to have your airport card replaced. Which is about $120.
/System/Library/CoreServices/Wi-Fi Diagnostics.app
and watch the console log for message indicating an issue with the networking or en1 device. – bmike♦ Nov 15 '11 at 23:54