[Antenor]

About 2 weeks ago I disabled the built in bluetooth device of my Powerbook 12" since I was going on a business trip and wanted to conserve battery power. I forgot to turn it back on until today. However, I just noticed that the bluetooth menu is grayed out and crossed and states that bluetooth is not available. Furthermore, when you launch them, the bluetooth utilities state that there's no bluetooth device attached to my laptop, which is of course not true. Under the Network settings, the bluetooth modem device is also grayed out. The Apple System Profiler does not show any bluetooth device and the bluetoothdriver kext appears not to be installed (but it worked before, so how come it is not installed?). I've seen a similar experience in a MacFixit forum but until now there has not been any helpful insights as to what might be wrong and how to turn bluetooth back on.
Does anybody here have a clue? Is this a bug?
BTW, as I said, I turned bluetooth off 2 weeks ago before upgrading to MacOS X 10.2.6. Could that be the link?

Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks

Antenor

[pat++]

Reset the PRAM (press command-option-P-R during startup).

[Antenor]

Resetting the PRAM didn't work. Thanks anyway.

Any other suggestions?

Antenor

[Karim]

Same thing happened to me on my 17". The only solution I found (I tried alot of different things -- deleting bluetooth prefs, zapping pram etc..) was to reinstall OSX. Not to big a pain, just put the disc that came with your computer and tell it to reinstall keeping all your settings then run software update to get the latest stuff.

[mrchin]

You may want to first check your System Prefs app. Go into Network and active ports and make sure Bluetooth is checked. If not, do so and see how you fair. Otherwise, create a test user to see if teh problem lies in your user settings. Then, reinstall.

[roders]

The same thing happened to me a couple of times on my 12" PB (though withought manualy disabling BT, it just dissapeared by itself), Powering off then doing a manual restart seemed to solve the problem (i.e NOT choosing restart @ the desktop, but shutdown).
Bluetooth capability has always come back eventualy to my 12".
The post below Illustrates what the actual problem probably is.

[wanderlust]

The built-in BT on the current 17" hasn't given me any problems to date, though I have yet to turn it off. I did, however, have to pull the dLink dongle out of my 15" a number of times in order for the system to recognize it and reset its properties. That, unfortunately, is not an option when it's built in. That said to illustrate, at least from my experience, that BT does need to be reset at times. I think the only way to do it when it's built in is a full restart (not log out). If that doesn't work, I'm not sure what the next step would be before physically disconnecting the BT apparatus.

[Antenor]

Shutting down the computer and manually starting it up again does not work. As I've mentioned, zapping the PRAM also doesn't work. I've also tried resetting the battery settings (shift, control, option if I'm not mistaken) without success. I've noticed that there are more people with the same problem in Apple's Powerbook discussion page.
Any other suggestions?

Antenor

[ibook_steve]

Have you tried reinstalling the OS yet? This might fix it. If not, there could be a hardware issue. Take it to an Apple Genius and see what they say.

Steve

[adamberti]

I had a similar experience with Airport on my 15" TiBook. It claimed one day that there was no card installed, and well, there was. So I went through the usual routine, just as you have. Reset everything possible (even booted into 9 to try Airport) and it turned out my Airport card was toast. I had the exact same symptoms as you. So I think you should keep in mind it could easily be a hardware problem. I'd follow Steve's suggestion and take it into a store.