This is a crazy question, I guess, but here is what I want to know.
I have a notebook Acer Aspire 5100. A pretty old one and best known for it's unreliable southbridge. The symptoms of it burning down are almost the same for everyone: notebook gets a burned hole in the chasis in the left lower corner under the keyboard, USB stops working, keyboard and touchpad stop responding. And yes, I have all of them. Yet notebook can still work almost flawlessly after that, you just can't type anything in or plug the USB-device. That means you can't, for exmple, enter BIOS and change boot priority, etc. So when I run it's preinstalled Windows - I can't do anything. When I run Linux LiveCD - I also can't do anything, I just can't pass the first step in Kubuntu's graphical setup. So here is what I did - I took out HDD and installed a FreeBSD on it using another computer, and then I inserted the HDD back into the notebook. So the BIOS still is inaccessible due to no response on F2 and the FreeBSD boot meny is also unskipable due to no reaction on Enter, so I have to wait all 10 seconds before the kernel is loaded.
But when the kernel is loaded, the keyboard magically starts responding. When the system is loaded I can use it fully. The keyboard just works. And what I want to know is how? The touchpad and USB are still dead, no USB controllers are detected in dmesg or usbconfig, but the keyboard is detected normally as atkbd0 and it just works. And FreeBSD is the only OS that sees and reacts to this notebook's keyboard. I just wonder how this is possible? The southbridge is dead without a doubt, and all other systems totally agree with this.
I have a notebook Acer Aspire 5100. A pretty old one and best known for it's unreliable southbridge. The symptoms of it burning down are almost the same for everyone: notebook gets a burned hole in the chasis in the left lower corner under the keyboard, USB stops working, keyboard and touchpad stop responding. And yes, I have all of them. Yet notebook can still work almost flawlessly after that, you just can't type anything in or plug the USB-device. That means you can't, for exmple, enter BIOS and change boot priority, etc. So when I run it's preinstalled Windows - I can't do anything. When I run Linux LiveCD - I also can't do anything, I just can't pass the first step in Kubuntu's graphical setup. So here is what I did - I took out HDD and installed a FreeBSD on it using another computer, and then I inserted the HDD back into the notebook. So the BIOS still is inaccessible due to no response on F2 and the FreeBSD boot meny is also unskipable due to no reaction on Enter, so I have to wait all 10 seconds before the kernel is loaded.
But when the kernel is loaded, the keyboard magically starts responding. When the system is loaded I can use it fully. The keyboard just works. And what I want to know is how? The touchpad and USB are still dead, no USB controllers are detected in dmesg or usbconfig, but the keyboard is detected normally as atkbd0 and it just works. And FreeBSD is the only OS that sees and reacts to this notebook's keyboard. I just wonder how this is possible? The southbridge is dead without a doubt, and all other systems totally agree with this.
