[iStudent 2003]

I have a MacBook Pro Core 2 Duo 2.2GHz (Santa Rosa), running Mac OS X 10.5.8, and all of the sudden it will not connect to my home network via airport nor ethernet. I have tried restarting several time, and still nothing happens. I've tried booting up Snow Leopard via a Firewire drive and that works, but when I try booting up Leopard on the internal drive nothing works. I've tried resetting my router and all of my other Macs connect just fine to the network.

When I go to the Network system preferences, I am only getting a self-assigned IP address (169.254.xxx.xxx) for both wireless and ethernet. I've tried setting IP address manually, but that doesn't change anything.

Does anyone out there any thoughts or suggestions?

[pra9ab0y]

First you need to check your router settings. Is the Wireless Security Mode set to WEP (Wire Equivalence Protection)? If so, this is what you can do.

- Open Networking > Choose to connect using the AirPort
- Choose the wireless network you want to enter
- For the password, use the WEP Key from your router wireless settings page. Now here is the trick. When entering a WEP key on the mac, you need to add and extra '$' sign before your password. That's it. So if your password is - 9876543200, enter $9876543200.

It worked for me. After hours and hours of trying and looking at that hateful error message. I found this info on someone's blog. I'd link to the original blog post, but unfortunately I lost the link. But the blogger had said that apparently, we need to add the $ sign to enable the mac to realize that what is being entered in a hexadecimal key (?). I believe this is what s/he had said.

Oh, and also, while you are tweaking your wireless settings, you might also want to check whether your router has been set to allow all MAC addresses or just a selected few. If you don't want to allow access to all MAC addresses (allowing access to a selected few gives you a better level of security), make sure you enter your mac's unique MAC address to the list. I learnt about this the hard way!

Hope this works out for you! Good luck!

Taken from another forum. Other thing you can do is make sure the airport driver is up to date.

[pra9ab0y]

or delete and repair your keychains. - not sure how to do that but google will help!

[iStudent 2003]

I am not using WEP, I am using WPA-PSK

[iStudent 2003]

I fixed the problem. I reinstalled the 10.5.8 combo update and that resolved the problem.