HP G60-535DX Wireless Card Problem

[smshell]

I have a dual-boot system (Ubuntu and Windows 7) that has worked remarkably well for ~6-8 months. Recently I upgraded from Ubuntu 10.04 to v10.10 and everything worked well for ~2-3 weeks. A few days ago my wireless card (Atheros AR9285) stopped working completely and would not respond to the physical button on the keyboard to turn it on. As I had no problems with 10.04 I downgraded by performing a complete re-formatting of the LInux partition and installing fresh from a USB drive. While the card is now working it is being hard blocked during the shut-down cycle and requires (2) pushes of the physical wireless control button to turn it back on after start-up. Oddly, it is also causing the wireless card to be shut off in Windows 7 (I have disabled the power-save function in Windows, this has not helped the problem). I have tried a fair number of the fixes available online and have yet to find one that rectifies the problem; however, I am only a novice/intermediate Linux user and may be missing something important. Any assistance on this problem would be most appreciated.

[smshell]

OK, I have been working on this some over the weekend and found the following: after re-installing Ubuntu 10.10 and the wireless problem still exists. However, I found a temporary fix elsewhere in the forums:

mike@tardis:~$ rfkill list all
0: hp-wifi: Wireless LAN
Soft blocked: yes
Hard blocked: no
1: phy0: Wireless LAN
Soft blocked: yes
Hard blocked: yes
mike@tardis:~$ sudo rfkill unblock all
[sudo] password for mike:
mike@tardis:~$ rfkill list all
0: hp-wifi: Wireless LAN
Soft blocked: no
Hard blocked: no
1: phy0: Wireless LAN
Soft blocked: no
Hard blocked: no


This seems to only be temporary as the blocks reset when the system reboots. Are there any suggestions on how to make this permanent?

[ScttN485]

I had the same problem. Thanks for the workaround. Did you report this as a bug? I realized I had the same problem and almost opened the back of my laptop to remove the card because I thought it was a hardware issue and not a software issue.

[smshell]

Thanks for the reply. I have not submitted it as a bug, yet. After posting my previous response, the bug seemed to work out. I have successfully rebooted the computer at least 20-30 times since then, and each time the wireless card comes back on. It could be a problem not with Ubuntu, but with the driver itself, as I also re-installed and updated the driver in my Windows 7 system.