usb keyboard dying at loader prompt

[Jeremy Chadwick]

On Tue, Nov 11, 2008 at 09:09:00PM +0100, Volker wrote:
> On 11/11/08 19:55, Peter Wemm wrote:
> > ...
> > * There were other consequences of using the partition ID hack - I
> > think I remember it turning off the apic for msdos mode.
> > 
> > Your problems may be different, but mine were caused by a BIOS
> > whitelist of MBR partition id's.  What a stupid problem.  On that
> > motherboard I ended up taking the path of least resistance and using
> > the PS/2 adapter plug on the keyboard.
> 
> Peter,
> 
> very interesting what you've found. That reminds me on some
> investigations I did as I was hunting USB boot device problems.
> 
> Some BIOSes do not check the partition (slice) ID but are looking for a
> file system magic. If a FAT filesystem is detected, the BIOS does some
> stupid things (like ignoring the active partition flag and booting the
> FAT slice no matter what you've flagged active). Just an example and
> off-topic to Andriy's keyboard problem.
> 
> But when combining that with your findings, it may still be a thing to
> check for... ;)

Since you folks in this thread have some pretty good experience with
BIOS behaviour and bootloader/filesystem stuff, could I ask that someone
take a look at something I posted at over on -fs?  I'm out of ideas at
this point.

http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-fs/2008-November/005317.html

Danke!

-- 
| Jeremy Chadwick                                jdc at parodius.com |
| Parodius Networking                       http://www.parodius.com/ |
| UNIX Systems Administrator                  Mountain View, CA, USA |
| Making life hard for others since 1977.              PGP: 4BD6C0CB |