WiFI: no hardware installed ???

[Dlass]

This is a pisser. I was playing around with OpenCore, and even after uninstalling it, my MacBook Pro late 2011(High Sierra) now comes up with "WiFi: no hardware installed" in the menubar at top. Duuuuh? The wifi is HOW I GOT OpenCore in the first place

How do I get my WiFi back??? System report says it's there, but the OS isn't recognizing it. AirPort Utility doesn't see it.

 

[MacsBug]

OpenCore does not have drivers for the older WiFi cards.

Once you installed OpenCore, did you install a newer OS and then go back to your old OS?

When you said that you uninstalled it, do you format the drive and reinstall macOS?

OpenCore drivers are stored on the EFI partition. If you only installed the software and did not upgrade to a newer version of macOS then you may just be able to remove the OpenCore drivers from the EFI partition.

To mount the EFI partition use the terminal and type the following: diskutil mount EFI Once the EFI partition is mounted you can delete the contents of the EFI partition and then reboot your Mac. Your WiFi should work after this.

 

[Dlass]

Thanks. Actually I didn't get that far with OpenCore BECAUSE I saw that Wifi had disappeared. OpenCore doesn't support old WiFi cards? Well, geez, why don't they tell you that? But maybe I missed it?

I tried doing a mass repair with Onyx, that didn't have any effect. But then I realized that I do a clone backup on an external disk every night, and booting from that clone looks dandy. So I'll just copy every thing back from my cloned backup disk..

 

[MacsBug]

If you have installed OpenCore, even if you did not install a newer version of macOS, it may have installed the drivers on the EFI partition.

To see if this is the case you can start your Mac while holding the Option key If you see your Hard Drive and the Boot Loader (efi Boot) then you have installed the drivers.

If you have installed the drivers, you can follow the steps above to mount the EFI partition and delete the boot loader.

 

[Dlass]

Well, there were a number of oddities about the installation. The instructions appeared to be detailed, but they didn't really match up with what I was seeing. I eventually decided to download and install the "OpenCore uninstaller' That was a joke. I "installed" it, but it sure wasn't obvious where it got installed, and I was never able to run it. So I just killed off the EFIboot partition manually. I'm movin' on.

 

[MacsBug]

Did deleting the files on the EFI partition, and then restarting your MacBook Pro resolve the issue?

 

[Dlass]

Well, what resolved the wifi issue was just copying from my backup clone. But the EFIboot partition was stil there, and I cleaned it up by doing "sudo diskutil mount EFI", and then trashing the contents in Locations. That EFIboot partition is now gone, and everything seems to be back to normal.