Something weird is going on with my keyboard. The keyboard is a USB-connected Unicomp, which works absolutely flawlessly once the computer is up and running. However, GRUB 2 (specifically, 1.99-27+deb7u1 as shipped in Debian Wheezy) isn't quite so happy. The failure modes make this a little difficult to test, but here's what I've been able to deduce thus far:
- The keyboard status LEDs flash during the POST, so the keyboard is detected (I also get a report "Detected: ... 1 Keyboard"); I've got maybe one "no keyboard detected" error from the POST, nowhere near enough to deduce any pattern to that, and I've been rebooting the system quite a few times in different ways lately
- On a power on from a full power off with the front panel power button, everything seems to work great
- On a reboot (either using
reboot
or Control+Alt+Delete in a booted system or in GRUB), the keyboard works in GRUB maybe every other time I try - If I hit the Reset button on the computer to reboot, the keyboard consistently does not work in GRUB when the boot loader comes back, and many times does not react to key presses during the POST either
What's even more weird is that I don't recall the computer acting like this before. I'm hoping it's unrelated, but it seems to have started acting up right around when I hooked up the UPS to some more things around my desk, instead of only having hooked it up to the computer and monitor. (No, the UPS is nowhere near overloaded; the load is reported as being in the range 7-20% depending on usage; around 15-16% of maximum load when the computer is up and running normally.)
I've Googled and found the suggestion to load the GRUB 2 modules uhci
and usb_keyboard
. I added a GRUB_PRELOAD_MODULES
declaration specifying the two of them to /etc/default/grub and re-ran update-grub
(there is now insmod uhci
and insmod usb_keyboard
in my /boot/grub/grub.cfg), but that does not seem to have changed anything.
I've moved the keyboard to another USB port, which does not appear to have helped. I would try an offboard USB controller if I had one handy.
BIOS/UEFI setup reports legacy USB support and legacy USB 3.0 support as enabled, and even if it didn't, I don't see why it would sometimes work and sometimes not, especially when many times the only difference between the two is which side of a warm reboot it's on.
The motherboard is an ASUS M5A97 Pro with UEFI version 1007 02/10/2012
.
I can't think of any other configuration changes I've done that coincide with when the computer started acting up. The logs do mention an upgrade of linux-image
on Aug 1, and that I reinstalled (it's noted as upgrade
, but the from-version and to-version are identical) grub-pc
on Aug 2, but both of those was a week before I even bought the UPS, and two weeks before I hooked it up to more than just the computer and monitor (I take care to not change too many things at once). uname -r
reports 3.2.0-4-amd64
.
I'm running out of ideas to try. How can I get my USB keyboard to work consistently in GRUB 2? What else can I check?