Installing VirtualBox has disabled my wireless device

panicked · Post by **panicked** » 10. Dec 2008, 22:40

Hi

My problem is that after installing VirtualBox, the internal USB wireless device in my laptop has vanished from the device manager and nothing I have done to restore it has worked.

Here are the details:

My laptop is a Medion MD96290:

Windows Vista Home Premium 32bit Edition
Intel Dual Core 1.68Ghz
2Gb RAM
120GB Hard Disk
Realtek RTL8101E PCI-E Ethernet NIC
Athenos Internal USB Wireless Card (I do not remember the model)
Mobile Intel 945 Express Chipset
Intel ICH7 Family Drivers

The wireless has been working as well as it can be with Vista for well over a year now.
I installed VirtualBox 2.06 and allowed the drivers for both the network support and the USB support to be installed.
When the installation completed I instantly lost my wireless connection and the entry for the wireless card had disppeared from the device manager.
I uninstalled VirtualBox and restarted the computer and the wireless connection and device had been restored.
I decided to give the installation another go but this time I did not allow the networking driver to be installed as I thought this might stop the wireless breaking.
The same thing happened again though but this time after uninstalling and restarting the wireless connection was still broken and the device still missing from the device manager.

I've been trawling these forums for hours and the internet. The wireless card is connected by USB to the motherboard and always showed up in the add/remove hardware section. However it is now not showing up there at all.

I've tried,

Restoring the computer to an earlier date with no effect
Reinstalling the drivers from Medion with no effect
Checking the BIOS settings but all appear to be fine

If anyone has any idea how this can be fixed I'd really appreciate your help!

Thanks
David

Post by **vbox4me2** » 10. Dec 2008, 22:51

Have a look for newer drivers, ea.
http://www.google.nl/search?hl=nl&q=7.6 ... eros&meta=
and
http://www.atheros.cz/

Locate your wireless type via your laptop model specs.

panicked · Post by **panicked** » 10. Dec 2008, 23:01

vbox4me2 wrote:Have a look for newer drivers, ea.
http://www.google.nl/search?hl=nl&q=7.6 ... eros&meta=
and
http://www.atheros.cz/

Locate your wireless type via your laptop model specs.

Unfortunately I don't have the full spec and Medion have hardly been helpful providing one.

The 'official' drivers that Medion provide are IEEE 802.11g Wireless LAN drivers, seemingly they are generic.

Websites that scan your drivers also fail to show any recognition of the wireless card.

Post by **Sasquatch** » 10. Dec 2008, 23:51

If you download and burn a linux live cd (like Ubuntu) and boot your machine with that, you can see what exact network card you have. If it is indeed USB, you will see it with the command lsusb from a terminal. Using lspci will list all PCI devices like chipset, videocard, sound controller, network interfaces etc.

panicked · Post by **panicked** » 11. Dec 2008, 00:05

Sasquatch wrote:If you download and burn a linux live cd (like Ubuntu) and boot your machine with that, you can see what exact network card you have. If it is indeed USB, you will see it with the command lsusb from a terminal. Using lspci will list all PCI devices like chipset, videocard, sound controller, network interfaces etc.

Thank you I will try that.

Ironically it was because I couldn't get a cd to burn a Linux live cd that led me to download VirtualBox in the first place.

Post by **vbox4me2** » 11. Dec 2008, 01:24

panicked wrote:Ironically it was because I couldn't get a cd to burn a Linux live cd that led me to download VirtualBox in the first place.

It happened to me to, not at VB install but while using VB and wifi and my laptop went to sleep... however the driver update fixed it.