Weird Keyboard Problem

[ctaz1]

This one has my and my friends stumped. Hopefully someone can help me out.

When I boot, my keyboard does not start working untill windows starts. If I boot to a boot disc, then I can not type anything. Which really makes it hard to work in DOS. At first it would work about 25% of the time in DOS. Now it is about 5% of the time. I have not tried the keyboard on another PC, but I have tried 3 other keyboards on this PC and they all do the same thing. I have tried multiple ports. I have tried USB and PS2. It does not seem to matter. Any ideas?

 

[patio]

What ver. of Dos are you running?
Do you do a lot of gaming in Dos mode???
Reason for asking is that Dos needs device drivers to run peripherials but it has a native keyboard driver built in.
So something along the way has made changes to the autoexec.bat and/or the config.sys files that load these native drivers...
What has me puzzled is that it originally worked, worked less etc.
A USB keyboard would not run if you didn't install the drivers for it as Dos never had USB support.
Now if you're talking about running in Dos-mode in Win-any flavor then that is a different situation...
More info.

patio.

 

[ctaz1]

Actually, I guess it is not really DOS. It is a boot disc for Windows XP. And since XP doesnt use DOS, is it DOS? The commands seem to be the same. If DOS doesnt have USB support, then why did it work some of the time? I can accept that DOS doesnt support USB, but what about PS2? Shouldn't it work in DOS with no problem.

I dont do any gaming in DOS. Im trying to recover info on a f@#$%d hard drive. If the keyboard worked, then it would be no problem. So this keyboard problem that I have been putting off as an annoyance, has now crippled me.

 

[Kevin16]

I highly doubt it is a keyboard problem, since you have tried multiple keyboard.

There might be something wrong with the motherboard's ports.

 

[sllewe]

XP does use DOS, but it is in the "backround" and you cant get to it. The DOS you a refrenceing to is prob. the command prompt. I think Patio may be in the right direction. But the fact that it works some of the time is a little weird. I am just stumped.

My apolgies

Sean

 

[patio]

I would move that drive to another machine as a slave and try and save your data from it asap. Remember if the OS is skewered even a little it could be what's screwing with the keyboards you have tried.Recover the data, format the drive and do a clean install of your OS.

Good luck and let us know how it goes...

patio.

 

[ctaz1]

OK, I dont really know what the problem was. I tried another PS2 keyboard and it worked on the first try. I dont understand why the USB keyboard worked every once in a while, but Im back up and running. The hard drive problem was a hidden partition. I was working on the computer in XP. It suddenly locked up. After reboot, it would go to the XP splash screen but would never load. So, after getting a keyboard that worked in DOS, I rebuilt the MBR. After that I got a message that said it couldnt find the autochk.exe file. So I ran PTEDIT from DOS and unhid the partition. Then everything came up just fine. So now I will be going out and getting a PS2 keyboard that works and keeping it on hand. Thanks everyone for your suggestions.