My wireless has suddenly became disabled by hardware switch, BIOS, rfkill, fn+f8 do nothing

I have a toshiba l655d-s5145. There is no physical toggle for the wireless, although the f8 key is supposed to do the trick. It doesn't. The wireless has been working since October, and suddenly, nothing. RFKILL reports that the wireless is hard blocked, but unblock wifi, unblock 0, unblock all do nothing. I inserted a usb dongle, and that is also disabled by hardware switch, although rfkill reports that it is neither hard nor soft blocked. My onboard wireless is

02:00.0 Network controller: Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. RTL8188CE
802.11b/g/n WiFi Adapter (rev 01)

according to lspci. Lsmod reports that these drivers are loaded.

rtl8192c_common        75767  1 rtl8192ce rtlwifi               110972 1 rtl8192ce

I resorted to reformatting the drive and reinstalling, but that also did not work. In BIOS I restored system defaults as there is no specific entry for wifi. Before reinstalling a pure xubuntu I went into Unity and saw that the airplane mode was on and despite being toggled off, it returned to the on position. I'm not sure where to find airplane mode in Xubuntu. What else can I do? I need my wireless.

Solution 1:

I found the answer in a thread over at ubuntuforums. I had to remove the battery and disconnect the charger, press the power button for at least thirty seconds, put it all back together and boot into bios. From there I had to restore system defaults, save changes, and presto, wireless is working again. I gather that this is a fix specific to toshiba laptops without a physical wireless.

• This fix also works on Acer Travelmate 2450

Solution 2:

If a USB wireless is hard blocked as well then it means it is definitely a hardware issue. Enter your BIOS settings and turn action keys on, then try disabling or enabling the wireless. When you enable action keys, you won't have to hold down the function key, so press F8 instead of function f8.

Solution 3:

I had a similar problem. But a little bit more confusing. I dropped my lenovo laptop one day and my hardware switch together with my built-in wifi adaptor just broke. I bought USB WiFi adaptor and tried to reinstall drivers, but no luck. Then I just went to BIOS and set "WLAN control" to disable and now everything works as a charm.