Eth1 Wireless Netowrk Device Troubleshoot

[jdarov]

First off, I'd like to say that I've been using BackTrack 4 for a few months now and I have had little issues with it until now Unlike Windows, if I have a problem I can usually scroll through these forums to find my answers quickly. Unfortunately, this was not the case this time.

My problem is this. Last night I ran apt-get upgrade and apt-get dist-upgrade for the first time after installing BT4. When I got up this morning and ran BT4, my eth1 device no longer shows up. Before I ran the upgrade, eth1 DID show up under ifconfig -a and iwconfig, as it is my only wireless device. I would connect to the internet by running aerodump to find ESSID's in my area, then ran the lines:

ifconfig eth1 up
iwconfig eth1 mode managed essid ESSIDNAME
dhclient eth1

to connect to the internet. And it worked perfectly fine. However, after I ran the upgrade, whenever I log into BT4 my eth1 device no longer shows up AT ALL. When I run ifconfig -a the only devices that it show are lo and eth0, which aren't my wireless devices. Running iwconfig just shows

lo: no wireless extensions
eth0: no wireless extensions

as well. Before running the upgrade, I don't think my wicd program was working because i would click on it and nothing would happen. Now when I run BT4 i get an error message on startup that says wicd's DBUS interface isn't working. I've also tried running

/etc/init.d/networking start

but it says that eth1 device doesn't exist. I have so many programs on BT4 and have everything set up on this operating system, so I don't want to have to re-install it. I went to the wcid wired-config file but there is no empty brackets [] in the file to delete like most people say is the problem.

Also, my wicd wireless-config file is completely empty, if that may be the problem. However, I looked all over the place and couldn't find an example of what should be in the wireless config file for wicd.

My wireless works perfectly fine on my other operating systems as well, which are Windows XP (I only use windows for Microsoft Word so getting the newer versions is a waste of space) and Ubuntu. But for some reason whenever I load BT4, my wireless device eth1 doesn't show up at all and therefore I can't connect to the internet while on BackTrack. If someone could please help me with this issue, I would greatly appreciate it.

Btw, my wireless adapter is a Intel(R)Pro/Wireless 2200BG and it's built in to my laptop. However, I don't think the wireless device is the issue because like I said before, everything was working perfectly fine until i ran apt-get dist-upgrade and rebooted my machine; afterwards, eth1 no longer shows up at all. And the wireless device works fine on Ubuntu as well. I believe it has something to do with wicd, but I would greatly appreciate any help on this issue.

I'm also a complete NOOB to these forums, so you may need to move this post to a more appropriate place.

[gunrunr]

I'm thinking there's a firmware thing with the ipw2200 intel wireless cards. For some reason i haven't been able to replace the firmware in such a way for it to come up with in boot. JDAROV take a look when the echo come up when you boot bt4 right after grub loads and see if the firmware error comes up and we can take it from there.

[Snayler]

Look at the following post. It worked for me.

How to create a new BackTrack iso with kernel 2.6.34

[jdarov]

alright on startup this is the information displayed about the wireless device

ipw2200: Unable to load firmware: -2
ipw2200: Failed to register network device

I'll try Snayler's suggestion and let you know if that works out. Thank you for your very quick and helpful responses.

Also, this is completely optional but something that would help me out a lot. If someone could link or copy and paste the original firmware file from /lib/firmware/*.* on the live boot CD i would appreciate it. I don't have my boot CD on me so I will have to re-download the entire iso and burn it all over again. If someone happens to have a boot CD handy and could copy and paste that file into the forum so I could use it, I'll give you a big thank you in all capital letters on my next post.

(Sorry I wish I had something better to give).

[Kesshin]

jdarov,

You might already have the driver and firmware files in /lib/firmware-2.6.30.9 on your HDD. Just copy the ipw* files to /lib/firmware and then reboot.

[gunrunr]

check the repo's theres a new ipw2200 firmware and driver that fixed the absence of the firmware on bootup