[xorpion]

My iMac was running just perfectly earlier today when out of the blue my bluetooth magic mouse and keyboard stopped working. The menubar icon said no devices were available. Even the preference pane is missing from Sys Prefs. I restarted in hopes that it would magically fix itself, but alas, no.

Any ideas what could have happened? And how to fix?

Any help appreciated.

Thanks

 

[mkolesa]

have you done a re-start of the imac?

you said you don't have the bluetooth pane in your system prefs, but you do have the menu bar icon. if you click on the menu bar icon, the last selection is 'open bluetooth preferences', what happens when you click on that?

 

[iTouch]

I have the same problem (intermittently) on my Mac Mini and I've narrowed it down to a defective BT card (however no AppleCare and too cheap to replace the card). If the preference pane disappears entirely there's a good chance the system no longer sees the card. You can verify this by opening system profiler (Apple menu > About This Mac > More Info) and see what, if anything, is displayed under the "Bluetooth" tab.

I would try a SMC reset and maybe even boot off another OS if that's possible just to rule out other possibilities. I'm assuming both devices have sufficient battery life left as well (though the chances of keyboard and mouse failing simultaneously are pretty slim anyways).

 

[xorpion]

I did try a restart and the issue persisted. The menubar icon and sys pref pane were no shows. Earlier today there still was no improvement (though why would there be since I didn't actually try to troubleshoot yet). Then the power went out. After the power came back on I started it up and everything was back to normal. So bluetooth mouse and keyboard are all systems go.

Until next time.

 

[iTouch]

Yikes I hope you're not somewhere affected by this heat wave haha - I'm pretty sure I'd survive no more than 10 minutes without power/AC/fans.

BTW if you weren't aware your power outage probably reset the SMC on your iMac which is why the BT came back (the SMC reset procedure on an iMac is to power off/unplug the power cable and wait 15+ seconds).

 

[pm-r]

I did try a restart and the issue persisted. The menubar icon and sys pref pane were no shows. Earlier today there still was no improvement (though why would there be since I didn't actually try to troubleshoot yet). Then the power went out. After the power came back on I started it up and everything was back to normal. So bluetooth mouse and keyboard are all systems go.

Until next time.

It sounds like you may be living in the Toronto area and can thank the power failure for the fix. ;-)

Just for the record, and may for the next time, a shut down and startup will always do more Mac OS X "fixit" stuff than a plain restart and a shut down and boot up into Safe Boot mode will do even more, and then just restart after using the later.

 

[xorpion]

It sounds like you may be living in the Toronto area and can thank the power failure for the fix. ;-)

Just for the record, and may for the next time, a shut down and startup will always do more Mac OS X "fixit" stuff than a plain restart and a shut down and boot up into Safe Boot mode will do even more, and then just restart after using the later.

Thanks for that tip. I usually just restart. But not anymore.