Some of the Android smart phones running on Mediatek SoC (system on a chip) like MTK6582 or MTK6589 display an extra WiFi connection entry labeled “NVRAM WARNING: Err=0x10”. This is because of the misconfigured WiFi file inside the NVRAM folder of the Android system. You can easily fix this by modifying the WiFi file in your Android smart phone. After the fix, this entry no longer appears in the WiFi connection settings. Although removing this entry does not really improve the WiFi performance, but it is just an erroneous entry and should be removed.
Here is how you can fix this WiFi NVRAM WARNING error in Mediatek processor based Android devices (Note: The Android device must be rooted so that you can make changes to system. If your device is not rooted, you can try the Kingo Root for easily rooting your Android device):
- Open Android Settings, scroll down to the very bottom and touch About Phone or About Tablet followed by Status. From the Status screen, note down the WiFi MAC address – write it down on a piece of paper. For example in the following screen shot the WiFi MAC address is 00:08:22:3e:5a:08.
- Turn off WiFi in your Android device.
- Install ES File Explorer in Android from Google Playstore. Launch ES File Explorer, touch menu button in Android and enable Root Explorer. Now open the folder Device/data/nvram/APCFG/APRDEB/ and locate a file named WIFI. Copy this file to external SD card. Connect your device to a Windows PC, copy the WIFI file from external SD card to somwhere on your Windows PC.
- Download WinHex on your Windows PC, extract the downloaded ZIP to a folder and launch WinHex.exe. Open the WIFI file that you copied to your PC.
- In WIFI file opened in WinHex, type the MAC address that you noted down in the step1, in the first line and between column 4 and 9, the MAC address without using the colons (:). Our MAC address in step 1 was 00:08:22:3e:5a:08 so we typed 0008223E5A08. Save the WIFI file in WinHex and copy it back to your Android device.
- Once again launch ES File Explorer in Android and copy the newly changed WIFI file in the folder Device/data/nvram/APCFG/APRDEB/. If you receive the overwriting warning then choose to overwrite. Select the newly copied WIFI file, touch on the More and select Properties. Change the file permissions to RW- RW- — as shown.
- Turn on WiFi in your Android device. Now you won’t be able to see the “NVRAM WARNING: Err=0x10” anymore.
Conclusion: Poorly configured NVRAM data can cause some of the Mediatek bases Android smart phones to display an “NVRAM WARNING: Err=0x10” entry in the WiFi connections list. This can be easily fixed by making changes to the WiFi files inside the NVRAM.