I have a Lenovo T410 laptop running Bookworm (12.11 according to /etc/debian_version). It's been running perfectly for months without a re-boot - but after a re-boot today (more on this later) it can no longer find network hardware, either wi-fi or Ethernet. "ip addr" and /etc/network/interfaces only contain entries for the loopback device (lo); /etc/network/interfaces.d is empty. Aside from the loss of networking, the machine seems to be running normally (although VirtualBox can no longer bring up a Windows XP virtual machine which uses the networking hardware).
This machine also contains Windows 7 in a dual boot (although I seldom use it). When I bring it up it can find and use the networking hardware. Prior to the reboot before the problem began, I had shut down the machine to examine its memory modules. There are two memory slots; one can be accessed through a panel on the underside of the machine, while the other requires that the keyboard be removed to access it. I confirmed that both slots contain 2GB DDR3 SODIMMs (I want to upgrade it from 4GB to 8GB of memory). It was after buttoning it up and restarting it that the networking hardware vanished (unless I boot from the Windows 7 partition). If I had really broken the networking hardware by poking around inside the machine, I would expect that networking would be broken under Win7 as well. I found an old backup of the hard drive; its /etc/network/interfaces also contains only an entry for "lo", and /etc/network/interfaces.d is empty. Is this information stored somewhere else? Is there a way I could activate the code that the Linux installer uses to automatically detect networking hardware without doing a re-install? Or are there other things I can try to track down the problem? Many thanks for whatever assistance you can provide. -- /~\ Charlie Gibbs | Life is perverse. \ / <[email protected]> | It can be beautiful - X I'm really at ac.dekanfrus | but it won't. / \ if you read it the right way. | -- Lily Tomlin
