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hobla

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Dec 22, 2013
19
10
It seems Catalina is missing a driver for an older WiFi chip that was there in Mojave, resulting in a computer without recognized WiFi hardware (!) – see also https://discussions.apple.com/thread/250720965 and https://apple.stackexchange.com/que...alina?newreg=1904677ef3d840f0a87b73a2cd7bd342

The steps below worked for me. Modified drivers by Alex on Apple's boards, thanks.

  1. Download the modified wifi drivers and unzip > you get a folder named WiFi_kexts
  2. Boot into Recovery Mode: restart your computer while pressing and holding cmd-R
  3. Open > Utilities > Terminal via Menu Bar
  4. Type csrutil disable and hit return
  5. Type reboot and hit return > computer reboots normally
  6. Open > Utilities > Terminal and enter cd and hit the space bar (don't hit return)
  7. Drag the folder WiFi_kexts onto the Terminal window and hit return
  8. In Terminal, enter sudo mount -uw / and hit return, then enter your user password and hit return
  9. Enter sudo cp -r IO80211Family.kext /System/Library/Extensions/ and hit return
  10. Enter sudo cp -r IO80211FamilyV2.kext /System/Library/Extensions/ and hit return
  11. Right-click on Kext Utility in the folder WiFi_kexts and choose open, click open in the following dialog, authenticate with your password
  12. Wait for Kext Utility to complete – this took maybe two minutes on my setup, and I got an error message in the end, as well as "All done"
  13. Reboot your computer normally and enjoy WiFi in Catalina
  14. If you want to turn on SIP again you can boot into recovery mode again and enter csrutil enable (hit return) reboot (hit return)
Edit: Link expired, now fixed.
 
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