Arch Linux

selkjo

Member

Registered: 2025-07-07

Posts: 2

[SOLVED] WiFi issues MediaTek MT7921 802.11ax PCI

Hi!
I’ve scoured the forum for hours now but I can’t figure out how to fix the WiFi. I haven’t found anyone with the same type of error message I got, so I figured I’d ask directly for help. Sorry if there is a post I overlooked. Also sorry if any info I give is redundant, I’m not sure what’s useful and I’m a complete noob.

I newly installed arch from a USB flashdrive, following this tutorial and the installation guide:
https://youtu.be/FxeriGuJKTM?feature=shared

I partitioned the disk in the same way as the tutorial so that might be where the issues start? I also installed plasma instead of gnome since I read that was better for my PC (ASUS Vivobook 14)

Kernel is: 6.12.36-1-lts, but I have the non-lts kernel installed as well. It just boots with lts and I don’t know how to change it.

When I run «ip addr» I only get output for «lo:» and no wlan0 or wlp2s0. We don’t have Ethernet either, so I can’t try that. And I’m not dual booting so I can’t check if the WiFi would work there.

dmesg | grep mt7921e 

gave a -2 error, and it says «init failed».

Specifically:

Direct firmware load for mediatek/WIFI_RAM_CODE_MT7961_1.bin failed with error -2
ASIC revision: 79610010
Direct firmware load for mediatek/WIFI_MT7961_patch_mcu_1_2_hdr.bin failed with error -2
(same message 9 more times)
hardware init failed

I tried, without success (a couple times):

modprobe -r mt7921e
modprobe mt7921e

Then I tried:

systemctl restart NetworkManager bluetooth 

(Without results)

I saw on a post that someone used «dmicode -t 2» to get some info, so I did that and got:

# dmidecode 3.6
Getting SMBIOS data from sysfs.
SMBIOS 3.5.0 present.

Handle 0x0002, DMI type 2, 15 bytes
Base Board Information
      Manufacturer: ASUSTeK COMPUTER INC.
      Product Name: X421EA
      Version: 1.0
      Serial Number: MB45NBCX00EXRZMB
      Asset Tag: ATN12345678901234567
      Features:
            Board is a hosting board
            Board is replaceable
      Location In Chassis: MIDDLE
      Chassis Handle: 0x0003
      Type: Motherboard
      Contained Object Handles: 0

I found this post about the same issue:
https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=305019

But I can’t download the patch since no WiFi, is there a workaround maybe?

Does anyone know how to fix this? Thank you in advance! Any advice is greatly greatly appreciated<3 And sorry for not knowing the code blocks, I’m writing this on my phone since the PC won’t connect to the WiFi.

- Sel

Last edited by selkjo (2025-07-09 13:15:01)

V1del

Forum Moderator

Registered: 2012-10-16

Posts: 25,153

Re: [SOLVED] WiFi issues MediaTek MT7921 802.11ax PCI

Youtube video installs are not supported, I skimmed through key points in the video and counted multiple errors, follow the installation guide on the wiki.

Other than that, the video sets up GRUB, you should be able to have the menu to select the stable kernel in GRUB instead assuming you ran grub-mkconfig after installing the non-LTS kernel, and make sure you've followed https://archlinux.org/news/linux-firmwa … ervention/ correctly and have installed linux-firmware-mediatek (would be installed assuming you followed that)

See [code][/code] tags for how to write code tags.

selkjo

Member

Registered: 2025-07-07

Posts: 2

Re: [SOLVED] WiFi issues MediaTek MT7921 802.11ax PCI

Thank you so much for the info! This worked and now I have a WiFi connection!:

# pacman -Rdd linux-firmware
# pacman -Syu linux-firmware

I'm gonna edit to add the code tags now!

Last edited by selkjo (2025-07-09 13:10:21)