Bluetooth and the HP Mini 110

I got this question via email.
Since I don't have much to write about OSx86 - I still haven't got my HP Mini 311 back as of date and I'm not as inspired working with my Mini 1001TU - I thought I'd share this email and the response to it.

hey LeMaurien19! i have a technical question and i hope you don't mind...

finally i replaced my hp mini 110's wifi card with the card for the mini 1000.

it's finally working! so now i have wifi on my 110 running snow leopard 10.6.

but, i lost my bluetooth! i have a disabled bluetooth symbol in my control bar and no bluetooth in my system preferences.

why can't i have both? it was the same problem when i was in my 10.5.x hack.

i'd have my bluetooth but once the wifi was running (after installing the necessary kext) the bluetooth would be diabled.

before i got my wifi card, my bluetooth was fine but as soon as i installed the card, my bluetooth was gone.

do you know how i can make it both work?

First off, I'm not really familiar with the HP Mini 110's innards. When it comes to wireless - WiFi and bluetooth -  I'd guess that either the HP Mini 110 uses a card with integrated BT/WiFi or BT module separate from WiFi.

But then he said he'd been able to make BT + WiFi work side by side before so I'm concluding the 110 has the latter config; that is, separate BT and WiFi modules.

It does seem likely that the module was turned off and so, when OS X is started, it does not detect the BT module and the necessary kexts don't get loaded.

So first off, if I were him, I'd try to put a copy of these kexts from /System/Library/Extensions (current Snow Leopard install) into /EFI/Extra/Extensions:

- IOBluetoothFamily.kext
- IOBluetoothHIDDriver.kext


And then rebuild the kextcache.
All this can be done by using UpdateEFI.app from the InsanelyMac Wiki.
I'd toggle the wireless switch to make sure I turn on Bluetooth as I restart the machine.

If that doesn't work, I'd try getting these Bluetooth kexts from Leopard 10.5 DVD disc or from any distro like iDeneb.

If that still doesn't help, I'd use a Linux live CD/USB - Ubuntu on a USB would do the trick. Boot the 110 into Linux and try to power on Bluetooth with it.

In the unlikely event (I say "unlikely" because it appears to me that HP started using integrated WiFi/BT with the HP Mini 311 and later netbooks) that the 110 has in fact an integrated WiFi/BT module, then I'm afraid I'm as clueless as the next non-techie grandma on this side of the planet.