Wireless not working on Inspiron 9100

my inspiron 9100 minipci wireless does not work. when attempting to insert a pc card does not work either. It worked fine till i rebooted it this morning. the wireless has never given me problems. I booted linux on the i9100 to test if the card was functional in something besides windows xp (software issue check) and it seems it cannot connect in Linux either I think it may be isolated to hardware. Does anyone know what could be wrong? thank you