Hello community. I have this problem that's got me ripping my hair out and I hope that you can help. Please bear with me as I explain the entire story.
For the past 2 months I've been having major issues with the ethernet connection on my MacBook Pro (mid 2010) at my dorm. Some days it would work, but most of the time OS X would tell me that the cable was unplugged when it wasn't. My first thought obviously was that there must be something wrong with the ethernet cables, so I had my landlord rewire the entire infrastructure from my room to the router 4 floors below me. Confident that this would have solved the problem, I plugged in my computer. You can imagine how I felt when I saw the problem was still there.
Because the problem couldn't be the infrastructure, it has to be either a software or hardware issue with my computer. I tried booting into Windows through BootCamp and sure enough, the connection was working flawlessly. Here's the strange thing though: after successfully connecting to the internet in Windows and then rebooting into Mac OS X, the problem would be fixed. It would return after a couple of days but I could just solve it by booting into Windows and connecting the the internet, then rebooting. I have no idea why it worked, but it did. Until this week.
Since last Sunday, more strangeness has been happening. After doing the usual Windows-connect-reboot cycle I noticed that the ethernet connection didn't recover in OS X as it "normally" would. So I went to have a look at the Networking preference pane. I noticed that the icon next to the "Ethernet" profile wasn't the usual symbol but rather a WiFi symbol. When I clicked the profile, the preference pane acted as if my ethernet port was an Airport. Even worse: upon clicking the + to see if I could manually re-add my ethernet connection and fix it that way, I noticed that Ethernet wasn't even an available connection type: only WiFi, Bluetooth DUN and FireWire were in the list, and the usual VPN etc. stuff.
So I did some research on Google, I seem to be the only one who has this ridiculous problem. I tried removing the preference.plist and NetworkInterfaces.plist files as those seem to cause problems most of the times, but without any result whatsoever. Today, when poking around in OS X to see if I could find the problem for seemingly the 1000th time, I noticed in System Configuration that under Hardware > Ethernet, it actually said "This computer is not connected to any ethernet cards." I am sure the hardware is not faulty because it still works under Windows. In fact, I'm using the wired connection to post this very message.
Now I have no idea what to do anymore so I decided to e-mail Apple. There, yet another problem surfaced: apparently they are not available through e-mail. Only through telephone, on a toll number at that. As you can imagine I don't feel like explaining this entire story over the phone. It just wouldn't work. I can't go to the Genius Bar either, because I live in Belgium and we don't have any Apple Stores here. And now I'm here on this forum.
Any insight on this problem and possibly some help troubleshooting would be greatly appreciated. And thank you for reading my post.
For the past 2 months I've been having major issues with the ethernet connection on my MacBook Pro (mid 2010) at my dorm. Some days it would work, but most of the time OS X would tell me that the cable was unplugged when it wasn't. My first thought obviously was that there must be something wrong with the ethernet cables, so I had my landlord rewire the entire infrastructure from my room to the router 4 floors below me. Confident that this would have solved the problem, I plugged in my computer. You can imagine how I felt when I saw the problem was still there.
Because the problem couldn't be the infrastructure, it has to be either a software or hardware issue with my computer. I tried booting into Windows through BootCamp and sure enough, the connection was working flawlessly. Here's the strange thing though: after successfully connecting to the internet in Windows and then rebooting into Mac OS X, the problem would be fixed. It would return after a couple of days but I could just solve it by booting into Windows and connecting the the internet, then rebooting. I have no idea why it worked, but it did. Until this week.
Since last Sunday, more strangeness has been happening. After doing the usual Windows-connect-reboot cycle I noticed that the ethernet connection didn't recover in OS X as it "normally" would. So I went to have a look at the Networking preference pane. I noticed that the icon next to the "Ethernet" profile wasn't the usual symbol but rather a WiFi symbol. When I clicked the profile, the preference pane acted as if my ethernet port was an Airport. Even worse: upon clicking the + to see if I could manually re-add my ethernet connection and fix it that way, I noticed that Ethernet wasn't even an available connection type: only WiFi, Bluetooth DUN and FireWire were in the list, and the usual VPN etc. stuff.
So I did some research on Google, I seem to be the only one who has this ridiculous problem. I tried removing the preference.plist and NetworkInterfaces.plist files as those seem to cause problems most of the times, but without any result whatsoever. Today, when poking around in OS X to see if I could find the problem for seemingly the 1000th time, I noticed in System Configuration that under Hardware > Ethernet, it actually said "This computer is not connected to any ethernet cards." I am sure the hardware is not faulty because it still works under Windows. In fact, I'm using the wired connection to post this very message.
Now I have no idea what to do anymore so I decided to e-mail Apple. There, yet another problem surfaced: apparently they are not available through e-mail. Only through telephone, on a toll number at that. As you can imagine I don't feel like explaining this entire story over the phone. It just wouldn't work. I can't go to the Genius Bar either, because I live in Belgium and we don't have any Apple Stores here. And now I'm here on this forum.
Any insight on this problem and possibly some help troubleshooting would be greatly appreciated. And thank you for reading my post.
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