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E6420 research thread


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So I finally had a chance to redo this E6420, installed 10.11.3 clean again then instead of mucking around with anything else I just went straight to installing 10.11.4 before doing anything else (installing Clover to the hard drive, installing kexts to the hard drive, not even adding sound yet) and it's the same thing as mentioned above, same setup, and again it's just showing 3 networks on Wi-Fi both from the menu icon and also in the network preferences pane as well.

 

I can live with it, sure, but it's just odd and I have no idea what might be causing it. I'm going to presume it's a change in the IO80211Family kext or something someplace. I checked the info under Wi-Fi for the system report and under Software Versions at the top the only difference between things are these two items:

 

10.11.3 Original Wi-Fi Software Versions:

Menu Extra: 11.0 (1110.33)

System Information: 11.0 (1100.1)

 

10.11.4 Updated Wi-Fi Software Versions:

Menu Extra: 11.0 (1121.34)

System Information: 12.0 (1100.2)

So I'm going to guess it's something there causing this issue for me and my particular hardware configuration, I might try swapping out the 10.11.3 IO80211Family.kext and see what happens.

 

Edit:

Well that proved fruitless (swapping the kexts) - while the swap was successful the results are the same so, apparently it's an issue on my config not caused by the kext, crap.

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Ok so, yet another follow-up and a strange one at that.

 

I have a Dell DW1390 (Broadcom 4311) card so, I yanked out the DW1515 (Atheros 9280) that was giving me the issues noted above. Rebooted back into 10.11.4 with nothing else changed and of course the DW1390 works but since it's just an 11bg card that's all I could see but I was able to click the menu bar icon and see what I expected to see: roughly 40 APs around me including the ones supplied by my apartment building's wireless service. So, I played with it for a few minutes, did some speed tests (disappointing actually, not sure why it was so slow, barely 7 Mbps connected to my regular AP) but it was working.

 

Shut down, remove the DW1390, put the DW1515 back in, restart, get back into OS X and, well, for whatever reason now I am showing more than 3 APs around me - in fact I can see about 40 APs as expected. I haven't changed anything else in this setup: all I did was swap the two cards for a few minutes to test the DW1390 then removed it and put the DW1515 back in and suddenly it's working as expected.

 

Of course I haven't rebooted yet to see if it'll continue working as it should but this definitely gives me hope, I just wish I could figure out what the hell changed by inserting the DW1390 even just for a few minutes.

 

Don't know if anyone knows about it but I discovered a nifty Wi-Fi scanner built into OS X (random Google hit turned it up, wasn't even looking for it, honestly). If you hold the Windows key (Command) and then click the Wi-Fi menu bar icon, you'll get two additional entries: Create Diagnostics Report On Desktop and Open Wireless Diagnostics. If you then Windows on the menu bar you get more options, select Scan and you'll get a traditional Wi-Fi scanner display showing what's going on around you, pretty damned nifty and I didn't know it existed (just getting back into OS X recently so I know there's a lot of stuff I'll be finding along the way).

 

I don't suspect I'll report on this anymore unless something breaks, just wanted to pass along the info from my experience(s) with this little wireless issue. I'm going to do more research and find out what the most recommended Wi-Fi card is for OS X on the E6420, I think it'll end up being something that's Broadcom based, perhaps with Bluetooth as well on a combo card. I disconnected the stock Bluetooth card in this laptop (Dell 375) because I just couldn't get it functional at all, not even connecting to my iPhone 6 at this point. Also, the SD card reader still isn't functional but that's a back-burner item at this point. Aside from those two issues everything seems to work just fine.

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DW375 works OOB afaik but you can patch the Broadcom Controller kext to be able to enable/disable BT. The SD card reader normally works with patched VoodooSDHC kext...

 

PS: your COMMAND-key functionality has been in existence for some time. And it just does not apply only to wifi, try it on other Finder's bar icon if you wish.

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I recently bought a refurbished E6420. I've been trying to get El Capitan installed on it without success. Yosemite will install and run fine. It seems to be an issue with the USB port restrictions in El Capitan. When it starts to boot I get the "still waiting for root device" message and then it stops.

 

I previously had upgraded from Yosemite to El Capitan but now when I try to do the upgrade to 10.11.4 it gets almost all the way through and gets an error and says the upgrade failed.

 

Currently using the OS-X-Clover-Laptop-Config/config_HD3000_1366x768.plist from RehabMan. Boots fine without video corruption with Intel injection. I think I just need to get the USB injection working but I have no idea how to get it working.

 

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

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I myself haven't had any issues with getting the basic OS itself installed meaning El Capitan using the guide by Jake Lo here (you may be talking about the same guide, for the record) - for my specific E6420 I had to make use of the DSDT.aml for the dual-link because I have a 1600x900 panel (Intel HD 3000 GPU, hoping to acquire an Nvidia based motherboard replacement at some point in the near future).

 

I created the USB stick from inside an El Capitan 10.11.3 VM actually, followed the steps as listed, jumped to the bottom to get the vanilla EFI folder then dropped the E6420 content inside it to customize it, moved that folder to the EFI partition on the stick as instructed, and it went directly into the installation without any problems after that on a spare hard drive (I keep my primary OS as Windows even now).

 

I've never encountered any issues with the USB ports, and I keep my E6420 on a dock so I have access to more (the internal NIC on this E6420 is damaged and non-functional at the actual port for some reason; the NIC on the dock works fine however since it's just a passthrough).

 

Only thing i can suggest is perhaps redo the USB stick again, making sure you put those E6420 files in the proper folder (I messed that up twice till I figured out my mistake) and you do replace the EFI folder on the USB stick with the modified one - don't just try and merge them. Delete the one created by the Clover installer when you install it to the USB stick and replace it with the modified one entirely.

 

Other than the Wi-Fi issues I've noted in posts above (which seem to have worked themselves out for the moment) and the Bluetooth (I don't use it so I just disconnected the adapter entirely) and the SD card reader (will work on getting that functional later) I haven't had any major hassles with anything else.

 

Obviously since you have a 1366x768 display you'll need that DSDT.aml which is in post 2 of that guide by Jake Lo, but I'm guessing you're already aware of that. I believe you can use the E6220 one for your particular resolution as I don't see one specifically for the E6420 with 1366x768 resolution - I don't know if you have the Intel HD 3000 GPU or the Nvidia GPU, so I'm sure you'll figure out which one is appropriate as needed.

 

My suggestion: back up whatever Yosemite data you have and do a proper clean install of El Capitan if possible. I attempted a Yosemite upgrade myself a few months ago and it failed every time so I stopped mucking around with this stuff for a few months but a little over a week ago I came back to it, found that guide by Jake and I've got El Capitan working very well at this point as I'd hoped with 10.11.4 (upgraded using the combo updater on top of 10.11.3).

 

Good luck...

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Thank you. The bootpack seems to have worked to get the USB ports working.
 
I had actually managed to finally get an install. When I ordered this laptop I also ordered a tray for a second hard drive. By putting the installer on the second SATA drive rather than USB I was able to complete the installation. The bootpack seems to have also cleaned up problems I was previously having.
 
The only problem I seem to have now is that I can only boot by adding cpus=1 to the boot arguments. How can I get around that?

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