Wifi, flashlight, and Hotspot all not working. What could it be?

[ramsesfan13]

Wifi, flashlight, and Hotspot all not working

Hi everyone, I've got an annoyance with my Nexus 5 that keeps getting worse. After updating to 6.0 long ago, all was well. A couple of updates later, my Wifi would not work, but not like everyone else's wif issue. All the wifi spots were gone and it constantly would just search for wifi spots, and connect to none. I tried everything I read on forums and such, including a complete reset, but nothing worked. Then after another update, and some of my apps updated, it magically started working. A month later, another update rolled out, and again, the wifi stopped working. Then, a week later, my apps updated, and the wifi worked. Now, yet again, after an update about 2-3 months ago, no wifi, plus, my flashlight does not work and my hotspot does not work. Truth be told, I do not use those 2 functions very often, so I do not know how long they have not worked. I realized the hotspot function not working this past weekend while camping, and I tried to use the flashlight function just last night in the middle of the night. Can anyone shed some light on this, not having wifi connectivity is really starting to be a pain. Thanks for any advice

 

[N4Newbie]

Re: Wifi, flashlight, and Hotspot all not working

Are you using a battery saver/monitor app? Or, Lux? Lightflow?

Get rid of them and report back.

 

[ramsesfan13]

Re: Wifi, flashlight, and Hotspot all not working

No, I don't have any of those. The flashlight is the stock/native one to Marshmallow, and I don't have a battery app, and I don't think I've messed with any of the stock battery settings. They look normal to me. The stock battery saver is not turned on and is set to "never" for automatically turning on. Under Battery Optimization, all apps are optimized, which is something I have never messed with. Thanks for the reply

 

[N4Newbie]

Re: Wifi, flashlight, and Hotspot all not working

Well, it is certainly possible that you have a hardware failure...

Has the phone ever been dropped? Possibly (but unlikely) the Wi-Fi antenna connector has worked itself loose.

Try starting the phone in safe mode and see if the situation is the same: turn phone on, hold power button for several seconds until Power Off banner appears, then press and hold the Power Off banner for a few seconds until Restart in Safe Mode button appears.

 

[ramsesfan13]

Re: Wifi, flashlight, and Hotspot all not working

I've tried the safe mode option as well, and nothing changed. I have dropped the phone a while back, but I have a case on it, and the wifi still worked then as well. Even though I thought of the antenna as an issue, but since the Hotspot and flashlight not working, I'm leaning towards a software issue?

 

[N4Newbie]

Re: Wifi, flashlight, and Hotspot all not working

Well, it would be a major undertaking, but you could always use the Nexus Root Toolkit to totally wipe your phone and reinstall the OS from a fresh download. See Nexus Root Toolkit v2.1.5 | WugFresh

Really, not terribly difficult but also not for the faint of heart, however there are lots of people here who can talk you through the process.

 

[alvintimothyjr]

Re: Wifi, flashlight, and Hotspot all not working

Hi everyone, I've got an annoyance with my Nexus 5 that keeps getting worse. After updating to 6.0 long ago, all was well. A couple of updates later, my Wifi would not work, but not like everyone else's wif issue. All the wifi spots were gone and it constantly would just search for wifi spots, and connect to none. I tried everything I read on forums and such, including a complete reset, but nothing worked. Then after another update, and some of my apps updated, it magically started working. A month later, another update rolled out, and again, the wifi stopped working. Then, a week later, my apps updated, and the wifi worked. Now, yet again, after an update about 2-3 months ago, no wifi, plus, my flashlight does not work and my hotspot does not work. Truth be told, I do not use those 2 functions very often, so I do not know how long they have not worked. I realized the hotspot function not working this past weekend while camping, and I tried to use the flashlight function just last night in the middle of the night. Can anyone shed some light on this, not having wifi connectivity is really starting to be a pain. Thanks for any advice

N4newbie provided a great suggestion. Whenever I had weired issues I flashed the Google firmware and returned the device to its stock config. using adb. There are plenty of guides out there. Either way, make sure you backup any files you'd like to keep. These methods will wipe your Nexus.

http://androidforums.com/threads/guide-how-to-flash-a-nexus-factory-image-manually.706533/

 

[ramsesfan13]

Re: Wifi, flashlight, and Hotspot all not working

Thanks guys for the replies. As I am an adventurous soul, and electronics are not to difficult for me, for whatever reason, anything with rooting, and Linux, etc confuses the hell out of me. Now, I know WHAT rooting is, and WHY it's done, but the HOW is sketchy to me at best. I am wanting to fix this, this may be my last option. A couple of questions/concerns:
1- I will need the most basic/easiest/explained well walk through
2- I only have Chromebooks. I do have a Windows PC in the basement I could fire up if needed, but has not been plugged in 2 years. Will a Chromebook do the job? Do I need to sideload Ubuntu or the likes?
3- How long does this typically take to do?
4- When I did a factory reset the first time, I have automatic backup enabled, so everything was fine. I just reinstalled my apps. My pics and files are already on Drive and Photos. Is this ok?

 

[ramsesfan13]

Well, after reading up on everything, I just dove in head first. I downloaded the Rootkit, and backed up my phone. It's doing it's magic now, so I'll update when it's done and let you know if it worked or not. Thanks for the info

 

[N4Newbie]

Well, after reading up on everything, I just dove in head first. I downloaded the Rootkit, and backed up my phone. It's doing it's magic now, so I'll update when it's done and let you know if it worked or not. Thanks for the info

I'm looking forward to your report!

 

[ramsesfan13]

I ran the toolkit, and it reset the phone. I setup up the phone, and it restored all my settings because it thought the last time I used the phone, it was a different phone. The flashlight works, but Hotspot and Wifi still do not work. Wifi just keeps searching and to coworkers searched for my phone via Wifi to check the Hotspot, and my phone was no where to be found. One question/thought I have is, if the internal Wifi antenna somehow got loose, why did it erase all my Wifi addresses? Wouldn't it just simply not connect? It doesn't even show any networks at all. Also, maybe I should have not chose "Yes" to restore from "other phone" ? Maybe I should have done everything manually?

 

[N4Newbie]

Interesting.

If you want to be wild and crazy, you could repeat the process but not auto-restore. Start the phone up as a new user and don't even enter your Google account info; just get it far enough into the process to see if Wi-Fi is working or not. If it's still not working then I would have to vote for a hardware failure.

Once you have made a determination one way or the other, you can do a simple factory reset and this time do (or not) the auto-restore to get all your stuff back.

 

[ramsesfan13]

Well, it's a bust. I went through everything, took the phone apart to make sure the Wifi antenna was plugged in, (it was), and turned phone back on and......nothing. No Wifi, no Hotspot. I really appreciate everyone's insight and assistance, but it must be a hardware issue

 

[ramsesfan13]

After all this time, I stumbled on this: [Q]Wifi stuck on 'turning on' - Pg. 11 | Google Nexus 5.
I have no idea how to do this, any ideas/walkthrough/tutorials?

 

[N4Newbie]

Again, interesting.

I read through several pages of that thread and the two things that seemed to work (other than sending the phone to LG for repair) were)

1. Put the phone in your refrigerator for about 10 minutes. Take it out and test immediately. For some posters, this would get Wi-Fi working for 10 - 30 minutes.
3. Disassemble the phone, removing the mainboard. Preheat your oven to 350 deg F. Place the mainboard on a piece of crumpled aluminum foil (to allow airflow); put it in the oven for three minutes. Remove, let cool, reassemble. Supposedly a permanent fix.

Both of the above seem to be predicated on the idea that the Wi-Fi chip is improperly soldered to the mainboard.

The LG repair seems to be inexpensive (around $50) but time consuming (many weeks).