Installing FreeBSD 8.2 amd64 on Thinkpad W520 hangs on atkbd0

Hello to all,

I just bought a brand new Thinkpad W520 and was planning to run 8.2 amd64 on there. I would consider myself intermediate with linux/FreeBSD. About the issue I am hitting:

1. Installing from FreeBSD 8.2 amd64 CD
2. BIOS settings are dialed in to be most compatible and only enabled the devices I plan to use (usb/cam/bluetooth)
3. Always hangs at: atkbd0: <AT Keyboard> irq 1 on atkbdc0

Researching I see many people have been running into this issue back from FreeBSD 5.0 - current and other BSD distros as well. Many of the threads people seem to have given up, others state the work-around is to disable the keyboard at the loader prompt and use a USB keyboard then build a new kernel after its installed. I can't see how thats an acceptable solution.

Digging deeper I found a handful of suggested boot options such as:
set hint.atkbd.0.flags="0x1"
set hint.atkbd.0.flags="0x8"
set hint.atkbd.0.flags="0x9"
tweaking the IRQ

Others suggested disable acpi, another said to manually load ukbd module (even though it looks like it was already loaded by default). I was able to disable every device on the bios and get an installation working with the native keyboard but then when it went to configure my bios-disabled NIC it kicked me out of the install. This leads me to believe that it works just fine and there is some resource conflict going on. Does anyone have any suggestions for how to perform an install with the original keyboard and with all my devices enabled/usable without having to use an external keyboard? I dont have a PS/2 to USB adapter and don't plan on buying one. I want to take the hard road so I can really become fluent with FreeBSD. Thanks
 
Sigh... sometimes after hours of staring at something and playing with numerous combination of settings you think you tried it all but I must have missed this one. Basically I ended up reloading default values for all BIOS settings then disabled ONLY USB UEFI. Thats it. Seems to be working just fine now.
 
I've noticed that toggling all other BIOS settings doesn't seem to have any impact. The only options are to disable USB UEFI which lets you use the onboard keyboard but then it looks like its disabling all USB ports as well. I tried to plug in an iPhone, USB key, USB HDD, etc and nothing. Not even line powering my iPhone (which would tell me at the very least its on). dmesg doesnt seem to show any activity when plugging in devices. Most everything else on this laptop is working great. Clean Nvidia experience, VirtualBox working great. Sound is fine. Just need to figure out how to get USB working and the webcam and it will be a fully functional setup.
 
I know it's been years since you posted this but I'm trying to install FreeBSD 10.0 on a Lenovo Thinkpad E545 and still having the install process hanging at this point. Did you ever get your install to be fully functional?
 
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