Wake-on-LAN packet won't wake computer

Question

I have Windows 7 64-bit and have done all the steps necessary to set up Wake-on-LAN. I then shut the computer down and tried to wake it. Nothing happened.

If I manually turn on the computer, it displays:

Magic packet received successfully

It seems that the computer receives the magic packet, but isn't woken up by it. I have changed all of my settings to allow Wake-on-LAN. Everything seems to be configured correctly, but the actual waking does not work.

How can I get this working?

Solution 1

Here's a list of things I've found that foul up WoL:

1. Obviously it doesn't work over wifi.

2. In your BIOS you need to allow PCI (and PCIe) devices to wake the computer.

3. Very few routers will route broadcast packets by default, especially packets that originate from the internet. You can either spend ages googling and eventually find the crazily complicated router config file setting (no way will it be in the web interface, and your router may not even allow it), or, simpler option: use something like Tomato or DD-WRT which will have a WoL tool built into the web interface.

4. Make sure the LED on your network card is still flashing when your computer is "off".

5. I don't know how to do this on Windows, but on Linux you have to use ethtool to enable the card to wake up - and set it to wake up on broadcast and magicpackets. Not just magicpackets.

It's not an easy thing to debug, and the whole WoL system is stupidly fragile.

Solution 2

all the steps necessary

Since you didn't list them, we can't verify this. There usually are 3 components to this.

1. The hardware must support it (Ethernet card with cable to motherboard WOL socket, or motherboard embedded Ethernet card with WOL)
2. There is usually a BIOS setting that needs to be set before anything downstream will function.
3. Settings in the network card setup accessed through Control Panel to look for Magic Packet and the various other iterations that can be used for WOL.

Solution 3

I had a similar issue and solved it, so I hope my experience can help someone :

My problem was with an option in the BIOS called "Erp Power Management". It was enabled and when I disabled it, Wake on Lan started to work. My BIOS doesn't have a "Wake on Lan" option in the "Power Management" tab, so I tried to play around with all parameters.

Solution 4

I had a virtual box installed on my computer and it was stopping me from waking the other computer. I uninstalled virtual machine and everything worked fine.

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Comments

[soandos]

Do your motherboard and NIC support wake on lan?

[DGoiko]

I'm currently using WoL over WiFi with a very simple OpenWRT AP with no special setting, so your first statement is not true at all. I've been doing it for like a decade or so. About 5: It is done through the network card advanced properties window, inside the Energy Management tab (Administración de energía in my locale, don't know about english). Most motherboards will allow to configure the built-in network card WoL settings from the BIOS settings, though.

[DGoiko]

Wifi allows to wake, but also to be waken (although not all chipsets do so)

[Dan Henderson]

@DGoiko In English it's called "Power Management". Some NICs also have settings under the Advanced tab that you need to configure as well - they'll vary by card and even driver version, but are usually fairly self-explanatory (e.g., "Wake on magic packet = Enabled"). I'm pretty sure you need to configure it in both BIOS and in Windows, though.