Native Broadcom card doesnt work anymore with M2 SSD?

[Bradamante]

Does this sound familiar to anyone? So here I have my main work horse (7700K, Gigabyte H270N-Wifi, Samsung 970 EVO M2 SSD, GTX 1070). Up until recently it was all working with a Samsung 850 EVO S-ATA SSD and macOS 10.13.6. I am using a native WLAN solution, specifically a BCM94360CS2 card in an NGFF->M2 adapter that is connected to the built-in antennas. All of that worked fine. No Broadcom or WLAN related tweaks required, as expected.

I now did a clean installation of macOS 10.13.6 onto a Samsung 970 EVO M2 SSD. That worked fine but now I get the problem that I can't switch on WLAN in System Preferences. The "on" button just does nothing. In System Profiler however the WLAN hardware is showing up just fine at en0 (Bluetooth at en1, Ethernet at en2). Ethernet works. Bluetooth works (like conntecting to my smart phone or using Bluetooth tethering to get onto the internet).

The only thread I can find is this. Do I really have to go and tape over some pins on the card? I'd rather have a software solution. I tried using Clover option (x) FixAirport + AirportBrcmFixup but that gave me kernel panics at startup ("ACPI Error: 6 table load failures, 3 successful"). In that thread they are also talking about kext injects but reading that I am more confused than before. Which kext am I supposed to install? They all sound the same to me?

 

[Bradamante]

I have now swapped out the BCM94360CS2 for a BCM943224PCIEBT2, changing nothing else. This works just fine. WLAN can be activated with the M2 SSD installed. I have also tried using different antenna, no difference. I am not using any Hackintosh-related patches or kexts. This could mean that my old Broadcom card is just broken, but I don't see why it would be.

I did notice however that different drivers are being loaded. With the BCM94360CS2 kextstat says that AirPort.BrcmNIC and AirPort.BrcmNIC-MFG are being loaded, with the BCM943224PCIEBT2 it's com.apple.driver.AirPort.Brcm4360 and com.apple.driver.AirPort.Brcm4331. I am pretty sure that before I used the M2 SSD I had the same version of macOS High Sierra (10.13.6), but there is a 1% chance that it was 10.13.3 or 13.4. Is macOS loading the wrong drivers for the BCM94360CS2?

To check I plan to visit a friend of mine who has a similiar hack like I have (GA-Z270N-Wifi, i5-7500, GTX 1050, macOS 10.13.6) and the same BCM94360CS2 (but a slightly different model) in a NGFF adapter. In her hack however she is not using a M2 SSD but a conventional Samsung 850 EVO S-ATA SSD. I will see what drivers are loaded there and I'd like to test my Broadcom card in her machine to check errors on a hardware level.

EDIT: I have now put my Broadcom card into her largely similiar hackintosh - and yeah, can't turn wifi on. So, the card is broken on a hardware level it seems.