Comment 36 for bug 190664

I think I found a solution to the problem. I am currently running 64-bit Hardy, on BIOS A07, and the wireless card was found during all of the previous 10 or so boots that I tried after the fix. So here it is:

Before the fix, I installed the backports iwl3945 driver to fix my wireless indicator, i'm not sure if this impacts the fix or not, so i'll describe the procedure anyway.

System->Administration->Software Sources
Go to the Updates tab, and mark Unsupported Updates (hardy-backports). Reload.
then:

sudo apt-get install linux-backports-modules-hardy-generic

and reboot the computer.

And this is the actual fix:

sudo modprobe -r iwl3945 #to unload the driver

Then make a file called iwl3945 in /etc/modprobe.d/

In that file enter the following entries:

alias wlan0 iwl3945
options iwl3945 disable_hw_scan=1

now to test:

sudo modprobe iwl3945 #reload the driver
sudo ifconfig wlan0 up #start wlan0

Wireless should be running now. Reboot the computer several times and see if it works for you.