Bluetooth: Not Available

[Weave]

when i powered up my powerbook g4 1.5ghz 1gb ram 10.4.2 this morning i was greeted with a squiggly line running through my bluetooth icon and a bluetooth mouse that wouldn't engage.

i went to the network portion of system preferences and bluetooth isn't even listed. here's what i've tried so far . . .

1.) repaired permissions, ran the daily script and updated the optimization using onyx hoping that would put things back in order. rebooted. same problem.

2.) went to the apple website and downloaded the bluetooth update 1.5 hoping that would kick start things, but that didn't work either.

its quite perplexing and i'm not sure what to try next. i suppose its possible that the bluetooth hardware went bad or got disconnected somehow, but that wouldn't make sense since it was sitting motionless on my desk over night.

what do you guys think?

greg

 

[agusgriego]

That happened to me also. There are some solutions to that problem in Apple's forums that include resetting PRAM, resetting PMU etc. I tried all of them to no avail, so finally I had to send my PB to Apple for Bluetooth Module replacement. Fortunately it was still under warranty.

 

[dalesit]

This is quite possibly fixed in 10.4.4:

Turning Bluetooth on and off rapidly several times in Bluetooth preferences no longer causes Bluetooth to stop responding, nor causes the On/Off button to become dimmed.

Otherwise, I have found that powering down the laptop completely (rather than just rebooting) can restart the bluetooth.

Cheers,

Joel

 

[vanesprinses]

Hi Greg,

I had the same problem this morning and this is what solved it:

Look in your Library > Preferences for com.apple.bluetooth.plis & com.apple.bluetoothFileExchange.plist
Delete these files

Shut down your Powerbook & take out the battery for 1 minute.

Restart & now it Should work again

Good luck,
Vanessa

 

[lurk]

The OS updates have a habit of killing Bluetooth on my Powerbook, each time I have to reset the PMU to get it back. On mine I have to turn it off and then press shift-control-option power for five seconds and then turn it back on. You should look up resetting the PMU on the apple knowledge base to see how to do it for your machine, it seems to change for every little revision of the machines so you never can trust what someone tells you will work for their machine.