Strange keyboard behavior

P

polar

Hello everyone,

I am trying to install FreeBSD onto an older (6ish years if I remember correctly) Windows machine of mine. I have previously installed Open- and FreeBSD as VMs without any problems but wanted to have it on real hardware now to get more accustomed to it. I chose FreeBSD for this endeavor and the installation process isn't going as smooth as I expected from my previous VM installs.

Problem:
After the install is initialized I cannot use my keyboard as expected. Some keys don't respond, others act escaping and most keypresses result in rather strange behavior, e.g. if I press dghj it will produce ^D^G^H^J.

This happens once I get the prompt to change the keymap and get the option to test the layout. Before this everything behaves normal. I didn't see any errors thrown during boot.

Things I tried:
  • first thing I did was rebooting into single user mode's /bin/sh to see what would happen, but the behavior is the same as above.
  • I tried searching for this specific problem, but didn't find an answer relevant to my case. However, some posts suggested problems between the X window system and certain mice, so I tried booting without my mouse attached, but result from keyboard stayed the same.
  • afterwards I tried another keyboard I had lying around (still same problem). Unfortunately I only have USB keyboards and no PS/2 keyboard to test. I connected both my USB keyboards using a USB to PS/2 adapter, but had no different result from my PS/2 port.
Now I am at a loss, because most how-tos and tutorials suggest changing the keymap to remedy any key-behavior problem, but no matter which keymap I choose the behavior stays exactly the same.

I can advance in the installation process or click options using my mouse, but all other text-prompts react in the same way, so I can't enter a hostname, etc.

I'd appreciate if someone could point me in the right direction.

Edit: I believe I should include: System in question is FreeBSD 10.1 RELEASE amd64.

Best regards.
 
Welcome! I have not seen something similar before and I’m not very knowledgeable, but just a shot in the dark: can you find and change USB settings (legacy?) in the BIOS? Also, maybe an USB expert will come to the rescue, so in the meantime you could look for errors in dmesg(8) output or /var/log/messages?
 
If that were my machine I would clear the CMOS and reset the BIOS to its defaults and try again. I would also check to make sure the CMOS battery is up to snuff. I have seen weird problems come from a low CMOS battery.
 
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