That is, of course, until they just break. Then, since there is no clear interface or error messages, they’re just perplexing to troubleshoot.

For instance my G5 tower, after some quality time in cold storage, wouldn’t detect it’s wireless card. The bluetooth abilities, which are located on the same piece of hardware, were functional. I surmised that something non-hardware was the problem, but how to troubleshoot when hardware was only being half-detected?

After a lot of poking around, opening things up to see about re-seating them, and looking in various forums, I did find a solution.

As mentioned in this thread (which was strangely hard to find), I reset the nvram and then booted the system. After some additional fiddling with the configuration, all became happy once more.

So if you are like me, and you get a “no airport hardware found” error for no apparent reason, try the following to knock the hardware detection around a bit so that it functions:

1. Start up into Open Firmware by pressing and holding the Command-Option-O-F key combination during startup.
2. At the Open Firmware prompt, type: reset-nvram
3. Press Return.
4. At the Open Firmware prompt, type: reset-all
5. Press Return.

If you are fortunate, you’ll be all set.

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