No WiFi, no Ethernet!

I've had my Aspire One A110L 16Gb Linpus netbook for about a week. The Wifi has been flaky, but usually comes back after restarting the netbook. This morning, it just didn't connect, without an error message. I loaded the network centre, it showed my saved connection, settings ok, except no connection. So I tried scanning for a new one, but it finds nothing (I'm not sure it even looks) and the rescan button is greyed out. The sliding wifi switch is on - I tried it both ways, and the wifi on or off symbol appears in the middle of the screen for a moment. At this point I was stumped, so I plugged in an ethernet cable to my router - nothing. The Summary tabs in the connection manager for both wifi and LAN connections are probably wrong - the Interface, Speed, Driver, and Hardware Address are all unknown. What's going on? I am reasonably experienced with networking issues on Windows, but I don't know where to start with Linux. This smells like a hardware issue to me - any thoughts?

 

Thanks for the reply, but that didn't work. I pressed alt+F2, typed terminal into the small window that appeared, then a bigger window appeared which was blank. No user@localhost, nothing. It said terminal in the title bar, and had a menu bar, none of which seemed relevant. It didn't register any key presses, so I couldn't type into it either.

I pressed Alt+F2 again, and typed mv ~/.gconf/system/networking ~/ into the small box, and ticked run in terminal, pressed enter, then restarted. This did make one small change to the networking, the manual ip settings I entered returned to dhcp. But still no wifi and no ethernet, still "unknown" in the summary tab for interface, speed, driver, and hardware address.

 

Searching some more, I found this thread which describes similar problems, cured by booting from a USB stick... how do I go about doing that? I know how to set the bios to boot from USB, but what do I need to put on the USB stick to make it boot?

 

OK, made a recovery USB stick, and now it's working. I'd still like to know why it went wrong to begin with, and how I could prevent it, but I probably wouldn't understand it.

Thanks for your help.