Sometimes when the system boots, it doesn’t see any network connections - it says “No connections”. It’s as if my Wi-Fi stopped working, but everything is fine with it - when rebooting to another OS, there are no problems with connections.
The mystery is that this doesn’t always happen, but I’ll say every fifth system boot.
Rebooting doesn’t solve the problem right away. Only after a while, when you turn on the PC, the connections are available again.
That is, as if this is a random process, that Wi-Fi will work during boot with a 20% chance.
Has anyone encountered this?
Are there any ways to forcibly initialize network connections (Wi-Fi)?
Are you dual booting? if yes, even though this may sound funny/unreasonable, login to you Windows and disconnect from internet and remove the “Connect automatically”. For some reason Windows keep the connection (probably because it wants to update while your PC is off. Linus Tech Tips has a video on why, i wont get deep into it). After disconnecting from internet from Windows, boot in your Ubuntu and it should be fixed, if not, its driver issue.
I am also using dual booting and probably fastboot. But this bug is realy funny.
And there was another strange advice - turn off the pc for at least 1 minute so the system boot could be cold to properly start wi-fi device.
For what it’s worth, I had this problem a few years back with one of my devices, and it was the beginning of a hardware problem with the Wi-Fi card - I was dual-booting Windows at the time, and noticed that the 20% had increased to 50%, and that the card eventually started disappearing from the system’s connected hardware lists while still powered on.
That advice makes sense in the context of considering hardware problems, since this issue could be caused by the Wi-Fi card (or some other component) getting stuck in an incorrect state and not responding correctly to signals. Doing a fully cold boot - including unplugging the device for a minute - can help reset components that might be “stuck” holding a charge, and that aren’t getting properly reset or initialized on startup.
The advice with a cold boot does not seem to work. If I turn on the computer in the morning, that is (in fact, it was turned off all night, not for a minute), then there is still a chance that when the system boots, the Wi-Fi connections will be unavailable.
But the advice to disconnect from the Wi-Fi network before turning off the computer in Windows seems to work. At least after that, booting immediately into KDE Neon - the Wi-Fi connection is available. But maybe I was lucky, I need to observe more.
Thanks to dusoft advice, I recorded the output for dmesg and ifconfig (in the state when Wi-Fi is working and when there is no connection) and analyzed their difference.
In the logs, when there were no connections, there is a problem: probe with driver iwlwifi failed with error -110
Then I found a similar problem - https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=296091
And again, this is due to Windows fast boot.
As a solution - disconnect from the Wi-Fi network before exiting Windows