Real Apple Airport Card (Atheros AR5006EXS) not appearing in Mountain Lion 10.8.5

[IcePiq]

Howdy!

I have a "real" Apple Airport card, installed with an adapter in my desktop system. It runs just fine in Lion 10.7.2, and runs just fine in Windows 7. According to Windows, it's an Atheros AR5006EXS.

I've just installed the app store Mountain Lion, and updated it using a combo update to 10.8.5. It won't find my AirPort card, and I'd like to find out why!

I notice the IO80211Family.kext does not have AirPortAtheros21.kext in its Plugins folder. Could that have something to do with it?

Based on what I've looked up here http://driver-id.info/srch.pci-ven-168c-dev-001c-subsys-e000105.html, the PCI ID is pci168c,1c which SHOULD be supported by AirPortAtheros40, according to http://www.tonymacx86.com/wiki/index.php/Wireless_Chipset_Database

So how can I find out what's stopping me, or restore the functionality from 10.7?

 

[philip_petev]

Howdy!

I have a "real" Apple Airport card, installed with an adapter in my desktop system. It runs just fine in Lion 10.7.2, and runs just fine in Windows 7. According to Windows, it's an Atheros AR5006EXS.

I've just installed the app store Mountain Lion, and updated it using a combo update to 10.8.5. It won't find my AirPort card, and I'd like to find out why!

I notice the IO80211Family.kext does not have AirPortAtheros21.kext in its Plugins folder. Could that have something to do with it?

Based on what I've looked up here http://driver-id.info/srch.pci-ven-168c-dev-001c-subsys-e000105.html, the PCI ID is pci168c,1c which SHOULD be supported by AirPortAtheros40, according to http://www.tonymacx86.com/wiki/index.php/Wireless_Chipset_Database

So how can I find out what's stopping me, or restore the functionality from 10.7?

This chipset (AR5424) is unsupported since OS X Lion. And yes, the support for this card should be in the AirPortAtheros21.kext plugin, which is removed from IO80211Family.kext since OS X Lion. You could try to take this plugin from SL (or somewhere else) and insert it in the ML's version of IO80211Family.kext, but there's no guarantee it would work.

 

[IcePiq]

Thanks for the reply. I tried doing that, but it never really worked. I either observed no change, or I got a message about an incompatible driver or something. So I gave up and now I'm using a $15 USB wifi dongle. Not as elegant, but it works. And i think I gave up on elegance when I bought a case with blue LED fan lighting.