ThinkPad T420s hardware wifi switch broken

Question

I can switch the hardware wifi switch back and forth, but I'm still not able to use wifi. I'm running KDE Plasma 5 / NEON as my desktop, but that is likely irrelevant.

I can run: rfkill list all

and see that the Wireless LAN is: Hard blocked: yes

but no amount of switching back and forth of the physical switch or running: rfkill unblock all

will fix it.

Any ideas? I'd love to be able to override this hardware switch somehow (as it seems physically broken) and I imagine there is a way, but I haven't an idea on where to start digging for this information. Of course I did all of the usual Googling and re-Googling before posting this.

Thanks

Answer 1

I broke open the machine and pushed down on the ribbon cable leading out from the physical wifi switch.. booted up and wifi works..

It would still be great to understand how to bypass / override physical switches like this on the hardward.