How to fix a 2008 13" unibody MacBook's disabled wireless card with the 10.8.5 update

Don’t install the software update to OSX 10.8.5 if you have the 2.0 Core 2 Duo 13" unibody MacBook from late 2008. It will likely stop the wireless card from working. (The late 2008-2012 15" MacBooks don't seem to have this problem.)

The wireless card works fine on 10.8.4, but not 10.8.5, so we have to downgrade. If you have a better fix, let me know. This is what I successfully did after chatting with an Apple Genius who verified the wireless card hardware was fine with a ping test when booted up to the drive.

 

First, save a time machine backup of this computer on an external drive to keep any programs and files.

Then you will have to  either burn, or mount the ‘Install OS X Mountain Lion’ file onto a DVD or an external drive so it becomes bootable.

When the computer is turned off and with the ‘Install OS X Mountain Lion’ in the DVD in the computer or the USB/Firewire/Thunderbolt drive attached, turn the computer on while pressing option for the first 60 seconds, or until you see a list of drives, one of which will be a CD or External drive for ‘Mac OSX’.

Choose the Disk Utility option and format the computer’s hard drive by selecting on, generally, the top drive on the left side of the Disk Utility.  I recommend naming the drive with the size of the hard drive.

Exit out of the disk utility after the format and then “Reinstall Mountain Lion”. This will take maybe 5 minutes to copy the information from the install file to the hard drive, then it will take about another 20 minutes to install it.

Make sure the hard drive with your time machine backup is connected to the computer and powered on.

After the operating system in reinstalled, and you click through a few screens to select Location and stuff, a screen will ask if you want to transfer data and let you select from where. Pick the “From a disk” from the options. Select your time machine name (it will be the name of the drive) and click ‘Next’. It may take about an hour per 100 GB of stuff needed to transfer with USB 2.0.

Once installed, you may update everything from ‘System Update’ except 10.8.5 because that may likely disable the wireless card.

A copy of the ‘10.8.4 combo update’ can be found on the Apple support site. Download, then click on that to install it.