Upgraded laptop hard drive. Now WiFi won't work !?!

[GoodEnough]

Said I would upgrade a coworker's Thinkpad T410. I took it home, and swapped the 160GB drive for a new 240GB drive. I used Acronis to clone the drives using my desktop SATA ports. The new drive boots fine, and Windows 7 comes up! Success! Tons of free GB on the new drive.

Not so fast. The laptop will not connect to my WiFi. Well, this laptop has never been in my home, or connected to my WiFi before today. So, it might just be my WiFi, not the upgraded laptop. To be sure, I reset the WiFi, and tested that my phone connects.

I will tell coworker to try the laptop WiFi at work and/or at home, and see if it connects (like it always has) If it does, then it was just my WiFi not playing nice with the laptop. Does that even make sense?

But, if it doesn't, then we know this hard drive clone upgrade somehow screwed up the WiFi. Is this even possible? Any idea how I would then troubleshoot this? Ugh.

 

[dbcooper1]

Possible but unlikely the clone did it. Will the Wifi SEE your SSID and just won't connect? Will it connect to your network with an Ethernet cable?

 

[GoodEnough]

Will the Wifi SEE your SSID and just won't connect?

How do I check that?

 

[stinger608]

A lot of laptops have the wireless card very close to the hard drive. It is possible that you knocked one of the wires lose when you was doing the upgrade.

Pull the hard drive cover off the bottom of the laptop and look at the wireless card.

Here is an upgrade tutorial on a wireless card:
http://www.pcauthority.com.au/Feature/292597,how-to-upgrade-your-laptops-wi-fi-adapter.aspx

Disregard the article, but notice the very first photo; you can see the white and black wires running to the wireless card. Check to see if one of them are off the card............Of course this is assuming your wireless card is in the same area as your hard drive.

 

[GoodEnough]

This Thinkpad T410 has a slide out hard drive.
Like in this video at 0:45
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5exq0MN8aJg

 

[chubbyfatazn]

Any chance you knocked the little wireless radio master switch at the front left to the off position? The Bluetooth radio also would be disabled if this was the case (if you've got the Hotkey extensions installed hit Fn-F5 to check).

Given the presence of the roll cage and the fact you don't need to access the internals to change the hard drive out... that's my only feasible guess. It's usually what happens whenever someone who uses one of my machines calls me in a frenzy about their wifi not working.

I've own/owned around 20 Thinkpads and have been fixing them up since 1997.

 

[GoodEnough]

Laptop successfully connected to WiFi at work.