'Media Disconnected' cannot connect to internet

[presariocq57]

Hello,

My Compaq Presario CQ57-426SA Notebook PC laptop has refused to connect to any wireless network for the last 4-5 days (works fine on ethernet), have owned for 3 years or so and never had a problem before. Wireless driver is Ralink RT5390 802.11b/g/n wifi adapter and says is completely up to date and working. So far I have tried:
- updated/reinstalled/rolled back wireless driver
- tried resetting Winsock, IpV4/6,
- disabling windows defender/firewall
- deleting my VPN, - DNS flush
- booting in safe mode with networking
- run Windows repair (all in one)

Nothing has worked so far, any further suggestions very welcome!

[Boggin]

There's a couple or more things that you can try.

Open a command prompt as an admin and enter netsh int ip reset resetlog.txt

If that doesn't do it then check the following services are showing as Started and set to either Automatic or Manual.

Go Start Orb - type services.msc and press enter.

COM+ Event System
Computer Browser
DHCP Client
DNS Client
Network Connections
Network Location Awareness
Remote Procedure Call (RPC)
Server
TCP/IP Netbios helper
Wired Autoconfig is set to manual.
Wireless Zero Configuration (XP wireless configurations only)
WLAN AutoConfig (Vista/7 wireless configurations only)
Workstation

If a service is not running, click on it to highlight then click on Start (top left).

If it fails to start then right click to open its Properties and check the Dependencies and that each of them are running.

Any Dependencies not found in Services can be found in Device Manager/View/Show hidden devices - Non-Plug and Play Drivers.

You can right click on any of those in Non Plug and Play and check their status but if they aren't working, then they may have a yellow alert next to them.

Some of those can be uninstalled by right clicking on them and select Uninstall then - Action - Scan for hardware changes or a reboot to reinstate, but create a restore point before doing so should they not reinstate.

And the old faithful of sfc /scannow run as an admin from the command prompt.

Next to try is to log into the router and disable the PSK security and reboot the router to effect then whether you get wireless back or not, log back into the router and re-enable.

[presariocq57]

Thanks a lot for all the suggestions, really appreciated. Still not able to connect sadly, all the services were running and sfc/scannow came up with no integrity violations. Is there anything else I can do? I have everything backed up, so would restoring to factory settings potentially solve this?

[Boggin]

When you click on the WiFi icon in the system tray do you see your SSID and its status.

This may seem obvious but sometimes Wireless can be inadvertently switched off, so have you checked the F switch combo for your machine to see if Wireless is enabled ?

Although you have rebooted the router to effect disabling the security, added measures are a power cycle, factory reset or checking for updates/re-flashing the router's firmware.

It's possible for a router's Wireless NIC to fail, but if you have any other devices that use the router's WiFi okay, then the problem must be with the laptop but as it's only been happening for the last 4-5 days, try your restore points back to when it was working.

Had you downloaded anything around the time that it stopped working ?

I'm not sure if Event Viewer would have anything on this but you could check for related errors.

[presariocq57]

Yep I can still see SSID in the system tray and have double-triple checked that I haven't been naive with wireless switches etc, and it's definitely a laptop specific problem as have different devices using the router, and laptop won't connect to other networks, public or private.

Have poured through Event Viewer for the last 7-8 days and can't find any errors relating to WLAN or wireless at all and haven't downloaded anything of note, Windows is saying I have the win32/small.ca virus (although I haven't been able to detect anything with Ad-Aware or Malwarebytes so may be a false positive), could this possibly be related?

Probably my own fault but have looked at system restore and have no restore points prior to the last few days so that isn't really an option, would a USB wireless Mini adapter potentially be a solution?

Thanks again for taking the time to help.

[Boggin]

That looks like a real nasty virus.

I had considered an infection, but running in Safe Mode with Networking can usually side step them.

From this article you have to manually remove its bits, including from the registry but even though you will be saving an infection - create a restore point first before making any changes and check to see the restore point has been created.

http://www.wikihow.com/Get-Rid-of-the-Win32/Small.CA-Virus

[Shane]

If it isn't virus related then it could just be a corruption in the saved networks for the wireless.

Go to the network and sharing center and then go to manage wireless networks. There you will see all the saved wireless networks, delete them all and then reboot and try to connect again

Normally if it is a network virus then it should be affecting your system when plugged into the Ethernet as well, not just wireless. Normally that is, viruses dont exactly follow any rules lol

Shane