Bluetooth no longer working - Lenovo T490 - Mint 21.1 (SOLVED)

[LunchBoxSteve]

I'm a newbie, please be kind:

Lenovo T490 Running up to date Mint 21.1
Bluetooth was working no problem for the most part, just would have Blueman crash every once and a while but a reboot would cure that.

Went to use it today and I saw the icon was missing from the tray, so I attempted to launch it from the menu. It opened up but I can't click on any of the menus and all my trusted devices are missing as well.

Thought there might be a corrupted package so I removed the Blueman package, restarted and then reinstalled from the Software manager.
Same problem.

Anyone else having this issue and if so any idea how to fix it?

If you require me to post additional information please help me with steps on how to get you this information. I'm not well versed in Linux.

Thanks kindly.

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SOLUTION:

IT'S A BIOS PROBLEM RELATED TO LENOVO T-490. When you switch from the Graphical BIOS interface to a Text based interface it disables the Bluetooh regardless of it being set to "Enabled" in the Text based BIOS.

I tried disabling it, and re-enabling it in the text based BIOS mode to see if it was a glicht and it still disabled it, so the Linux Kernel can't find it on boot. If you switch back to the Graphical Interface it re-enables the Bluetooth and the Kernel can then find it on boot.

What got be thinking to try this is, every time I have a problem I try to go back and remember what may have changed since the problem occurred.
I tried rolling back the most recent few Kernel updates, then my TimeShift back-up's and still the problem persisted and then I thought, hmmm maybe it was when I changed the BIOS to the text interface from the GUI type maybe there is a bug. Sure enough that was it.

I hope this helps someone else in future.

I also let Lenovo know about it here because trying to contact their support by phone only got me some brain-dead customer support person that doesn't even understand the problem and was just encouraging me to mail in my laptop for repair (still under warranty), despite telling them it's a bug in their BIOS code. Customer service today is sooooooo bad everywhere it seems.

https://forums.lenovo.com/t5/ThinkPad-T ... -p/5229444

Regards,

Steve