Bluetooth gone...super gone.

[CharlesRobinson]

I've read some of the similar threads on this issue, but I fear I may have transcended the issue to a new plane of pain in the neck...
I've got a 17" Pbook 1.5 GHz, and I've got the same disappearing problem that's been seen in other threads.
https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/204737/ (Pictures and stuff documenting the problem here, too.)

Anyway, I've run permissions check, rebooted, fsck, zapped pram, and the rest of the basic troubleshooters that I could think of. What kills me is that the System Profiler still gives me a Bluetooth tab under Hardware ("no information provided", of course). What kills me yet further is booting on my backup drive (which is mostly clean) also gives me no PreferencePane for Bluetooth.
Am I right to believe that if the tab still exists in Profiler that I don't have a hardware meltdown? Is there a solution that won't cost me up the river from AppleCare since I don't have any protection plan remaining?

If it helps answer a question I might get, the software version installed for my Bluetooth PrefPane is 1.7.5, according to Profiler.

So...any ideas?

 

[mad jew]

You mentioned all the usual favourites except the PMU reset. Have you tried this yet?

 

[CharlesRobinson]

Yeah, I did...I continued digging after that post, found the apple doc on it, tried...even did it without anything on my USB tree...nothing.[sigh]

 

[mad jew]

Just out of interest, do you have 1GB of RAM or more? There was a problem with this a while ago but I thought Apple had fixed it in a system update.

 

[CharlesRobinson]

Funny you say that. When I was poking around, I noticed my power-up check had failed, giving me some sort of memory error and something about SO_DIMM being reversed (memory errors of my own...can't remember squat).
On further inspection, I noticed that my memory was only at 512. I've got a 512 that came with the Pbook and a gig that I bought off crucial when I got the thing. I assumed that the gig expansion was simply not being used because of this error.
Anyway, I popped open the bottom when I was doing the PMU reset, and swapped the positions of the two chips, thinking maybe I had put them in the wrong slots a few months ago during my last pbook surgery (removing and replacing the harddrive...did you know AppleCare charges ~$1,000 for that operation!?!?), and on reboot the power-up self check passed and I had my 1.5 gigs back.

You think it might be of any significance?

 

[mad jew]

Could be... I'm guessing you didn't get your Bluetooth back though. Maybe try pulling the 1GB stick out completely if it's not too much trouble. See if that has any effect.

 

[CharlesRobinson]

Yeah, tried that. No effect.
I figured I didn't have anything to lose, so I pulled the dongle itself (lives next to left speaker on the 17", if anyone was curious) and reconnected it. Running the 1.2 firmware updater on the reconnected chip, all I get is "waiting for device to process data...", counts to zero, twice, downloads a small chunk to the device, waits some more, downloads a little bit, then aborts, with some variation on how far down that list it got on each of my 14 thousand attempts (not literally, but there were a lot...).

I'm not one to give up, but this is starting to look like a losing fight.

 

[Nermal]

Am I right to believe that if the tab still exists in Profiler that I don't have a hardware meltdown?

I have Bluetooth listed in Profiler on a non-Bluetooth system

 

[CharlesRobinson]

Yeah, I figured out that was wrong when I pulled the chip and saw it was still listed even with nothing connected.

I'm becoming convinced this is a firmware problem; the Dev Tools USB Prober app sees the device as an unknown device from apple, and the 1.2 update simply does not work. Not sure how to fix that.