No keyboard! Help!

[Muse]

Things are spinning out of control now. Please tell me - I've got no keyboard. Doesn't a PC give an error on POST when there's no keyboard? I have an MS ergonomic PS/2 keyboard, and it was working today but now it isn't. It acts like it's not even connected. I swapped keyboards with one that's the old AT kind, with an AT --> PS/2 adaptor, and it's the same. However, I never did that before so I'm not 100% sure what's up. However, I sort of doubt that the PS/2 keyboard suddenly stopped working. I've been troubleshooting issues that suddenly started yesterday and I suspected my RAM or the PSU for reasons you can see below, where I quote another post just recently made (within the last 24 hours). I'm typing this at my second computer which is not internet connected. I'm going to copy this file to floppy and sneaker-net it to the lame PC and use my mouse to copy and paste text into THIS post. Is my motherboard dying?

I have another BIOS chip for this MB, an Epox 8K7A. Is it possible that swapping out the BIOS chip will fix this? I'd heard that my MB in the 1.0 rev. had a problem with the BIOS chips going bad, and I got Epox to send me one when I was getting a lot of BSODs.


As you can see in my quoted post below, I was planning on building a 2nd system (to replace my current 2nd system which is really old - AT system with 64 MB RAM and Cyrix P166+ CPU). So, I have a new MB, but I wasn't planning on making it my #1 system for a while. Wanted time and preparation and obviously it's a little hard to prepare a system for MB upgrade when it doesn't have keyboard support! I'm going to write down all the programs in Add/Remove programs so I know what I want to restore to a new system. I did a little research and figure that just swapping MBs is asking for trouble. Note: I'm multibooting OSs (in order of how much I use them):

Win2k (99%)
Win98SE (.5 %)
WinNT 4 SP6a (.5%)

As you can see in my post quoted below, I was having problems with MP3's sounding distorted for brief moments and quite occasionally and also noticed occasional jumping of my mouse. But the keyboard disappearing has me in crisis mode.

Thanks for any help. I'll check back here for posts. With mouse support, I can check the forums, but right now I can't answer except to type on my other system and sneaker-net.Print this thread.
Thread Title Sudden instability in Win2k - can I get some ideas?



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Date Posted: 09/21/2002 4:14 PM
Posted By: Muse (Senior Member)
My system was quite stable until the last day or so. First time I noticed a problem was TODAY. See below for my system specs. As seen in the specs, I multiboot, however my OS of choice and the only one I've used this week is Windows 2000 Pro, SP2. I made a couple of changes this week:

1. I swapped out my 2 sticks of Crucial 256 MB ECC PC2100 for a stick of PC2700 (Samsung chips on generic PCB) I bought for another machine that I will be assembling next week (MSI KT3 Ultra2 with XP 1700+). At first it worked fine. The vendor says on the receipt that I have one week to swap or get credit so I decided to test it in my current machine.

2. Yesterday I swapped out my cheap Enlight 300w PSU for a new Antec True430, again everything seemed to work fine except that I got an error the first time I booted from Motherboard Monitor. It was a tiny dialog saying "Privileged Instruction", and an OK button. After that one hiccup, no problems on reboot.

I actually slowed down my CPU yesterday from the overclocked 1.4 to 1.2, since my immediate goal is to quiet down this machine, hence the Antec PSU, which is supposed to be pretty quiet. I had experienced no problems running at 1.4.

Today, I booted the machine and played an MP3 file that I wanted to hear. It's always sounded fine and I've never had any issues with playing MP3s before with this machine. However, I noticed some nasty distortion around 10 seconds into the recording. Other MP3s were behaving similarly - weird distortion occasionally. Also sometimes little blips where it seemed to skip. Now this is probably a big clue: Twice I tried to download my email via my DSL connection, 5 messages. When it says downloading message 2 of 5, both times I was listening to this same MP3 and the sound would stop, resume after a few seconds for a second and stop again. Couldn't get into Task Manager. The whole system sort of locked up and I had to reset the machine. I've noticed that my MS Intellimouse USB optical mouse is jumping around sometimes, too. Usually it's stable and smooth. I ran memtest86 on the stick this morning, just the default tests, not the full set, and I got no errors with one pass through the tests.

Thanks for any help. Here's my system (except that I've swapped the PSU and RAM like I said, and I've slowed my T-bird down to 1.2 GHz):

Epox 8K7A motherboard
Athlon 1.2 GHz CPU running at 1.4, 133 CPU clock (At 1.2 now, though)
2 x 256 MB Crucial DDR ECC PC2100 266 RAM (512 MB Samsung PC2700 on generic PCB now)
MSI geforce2 Pro 64 MB DDR videocard
Hercules Game Theater XP soundcard
USR Model 2977 PCI hardware modem
Promise Ultra100 TX2 IDE controller
IBM Deskstar 60GXP 60 GB HDD ATA-100 IDE (Promise IDE1 Master) - Boot drive
IBM Deskstar 60GXP 40 GB HDD ATA-100 IDE (Promise IDE2 Master)
Pioneer 16x 106S Slot loader DVD IDE (Motherboard IDE1 Master)
Liteon 24102B CD-RW IDE 24x (Motherboard IDE2 Master)
Iomega Zip 250 IDE (Motherboard IDE2 slave)
Mitsumi Floppy
Enlight midtower case with 300 Watt PSU (swapped for Antec True430 PSU)
Nanao F2-17ex monitor
Windows 2000 Professional Service Pack 2 (OS of choice)
Windows 98SE
Windows NT4 SP6a
Run NAV 2001 in background

Does anyone have an idea what's wrong? I could swap the RAM and see if things clear up and if that doesn't work, the PSU. I'm NEVER going to buy generic RAM again, NEVER!

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"The soul of sweet delight can never be defiled." - William Blake

Squash the Anandtech Forums headache-inducing java buggers: Use Mozilla. Fifty million fire-breathing dragons can't be wrong... well, I don't know how many.
Rigzilla

09/22/2002 10:03:11|U






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Date Posted: 09/21/2002 5:24 PM
Posted By: Muse (Senior Member)
I found that I could not download that one email, the 2nd. Win2k would freeze. I couldn't stop the download or close the email client (Forte Agent). I could only reset! Since I multiboot I decided to try Win98SE. I couldn't get that message there either! However, I could end task on the Forte Agent. I sent an email to the guy who sent me the message asking him for help. I decided to try my Windows NT 4 SP6a, not expecting anything significantly different, but there appeared to be no problem and all my email messages downloaded fine, AFAIK.

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"The soul of sweet delight can never be defiled." - William Blake

Squash the Anandtech Forums headache-inducing java buggers: Use Mozilla. Fifty million fire-breathing dragons can't be wrong... well, I don't know how many.
Rigzilla




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Date Posted: 09/22/2002 7:03 AM
Posted By: Muse (Senior Member)
bump

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"The soul of sweet delight can never be defiled." - William Blake

Squash the Anandtech Forums headache-inducing java buggers: Use Mozilla. Fifty million fire-breathing dragons can't be wrong... well, I don't know how many.
Rigzilla




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Date Posted: 09/22/2002 9:59 AM
Posted By: Muse (Senior Member)
My RAM timings are not overclocked and "Normal", not fast.

I swapped the RAM out with my previous RAM, but the problem persists - very occasional unmistakable distortion when playing known good MP3s. If I play the file again in the same section it doesn't necessarily distort in the same places, and if it does, not the same way, so it's not based solely in what's in the MP3 file. All I can think to do now is swap out the PSU I just installed Friday with my old one, a royal hassle, but I can't think of another stone to turn over. Any ideas appreciated.

Here's another clue for sure! I'm listening to a known good MP3 and it suddenly distorted for a 1/2 second. Sounded kind of like when you blow out and flap your lips, ya know what I mean? Well, my MS Intellimouse Explorer USB mouse cursor stuttered and strayed at exactly the same time as the distortion happened! What's going on? Thanks for any ideas.

 

[Muse]

mouseI've got no keyboard:frown:

 

[Zepper]

You said you tried your AT kbd w/ and AT to PS/2 adapter, did you try the reverse (w/ a PS/w to AT adapter)? Or to try your "bad" kbd on a friend's system? Or try a USB kbd on your system? There is also the possibility of a blown kbd fuse (in the 5v line of your kbd connector). That can be easily tested with a voltmeter when powered up, or an ohmmeter when powered down. Any reasonably comptent repair shop should be able to fix that for cheap bux.
.b.h.

 

[Muse]

Originally posted by: Zepper
You said you tried your AT kbd w/ and AT to PS/2 adapter, did you try the reverse (w/ a PS/w to AT adapter)? Or to try your "bad" kbd on a friend's system? Or try a USB kbd on your system? There is also the possibility of a blown kbd fuse (in the 5v line of your kbd connector). That can be easily tested with a voltmeter when powered up, or an ohmmeter when powered down. Any reasonably comptent repair shop should be able to fix that for cheap bux.
.b.h.

I couldn't try the reverse because I don't have a PS/2 --> AT adapter, just the other way around. Don't have access to a "friend's system" but I do have another new MB and case I was going to assemble this week and still plan to. I was just waiting for the HSF which should arrive today. Naturally, I'd like to have my #1 system working. I'm typing this on my not i-unconnected AT box, having brought your post over as a .txt file on floppy. Will reverse the trip to post this. This makes me appreciate how good I have it when I lose mouse support. Losing the keyboard sucks. Well, it's not going blind or deaf.

I don't think it's a power problem (blown fuse) because I see the Num Lock, etc. lights flash for a fraction of a second during the boot sequence.

Please pardon my previous post which must have seemed long and sprawling if not rambling but I composed it with a mouse, largely, by copying and pasting portion(s) of other post(s). Thanks for the help.

 

[Zepper]

Sorry, you didn't report that the lights on your kbd lit during post. Could be a bad kbd controller. Used to be a separate chip bigger than the old-fashioned BIOS chips, but now I think are integrated in the chipset. May need to RMA that mobo if it's still in warranty.
.bh.

 

[Muse]

Originally posted by: Zepper
Sorry, you didn't report that the lights on your kbd lit during post. Could be a bad kbd controller. Used to be a separate chip bigger than the old-fashioned BIOS chips, but now I think are integrated in the chipset. May need to RMA that mobo if it's still in warranty.
.bh.

How long are those MB warranties? Mine's an Epox. Turned out I had the KB plugged into the mouse PS/2 connector. I think I need a vacation. Well, I'm still having my other problem, distortion when listening to MP3s in Win2000 (OK in Win98SE - I multiboot), and my mouse cursor jumps around too.

 

[Zepper]

Mouse cursor jumping could be virus or both problems perhaps symptoms of IRQ sharing problems. If you are playing MP3s from a hard drive make sure you aren't doing anything that would cause the heads of that drive to be moved around while the file is playing. Does playing MP3s from a CD show the same problem?
. bh.

 

[Muse]

Originally posted by: Zepper
Mouse cursor jumping could be virus or both problems perhaps symptoms of IRQ sharing problems. If you are playing MP3s from a hard drive make sure you aren't doing anything that would cause the heads of that drive to be moved around while the file is playing. Does playing MP3s from a CD show the same problem?
. bh.

IRQ sharing seems like a likely cause. Didn't have the problem a month or two ago, though. Don't know what could have brought it on. I am thinking of Ghosting back an image I made of my Win2000 partition not long ago. Have a feeling it might not have the "problem", but that still doesn't answer the question: what is causing this and what can I do to keep it from happening any more. It's really annoying. I just put a CD-RW (packet written with InCD) in my CD-RW drive and played a track that I like for demoing the problem because 75+% of the time it distorts about 7 seconds or so into the song. The same MP3 sounds great every time in my iRiver SlimX portable MP3 player. I distorted on cue when played from my Liteon 24x CD-RW player instead of from the HD.

I do have another hunch but I don't know if it's good. I was having some problems when I first installed the new Promise TX2 Ultra100 IDE controller Windows 2000 driver and BIOS update a couple months ago or so. At the time I was trying to get SP3 to work in Win2000, but reverted to SP2. My VPN software doesn't seem to like SP3 and neither does my system. Anyway, I think that stuff is tangential, not the real cause of this problem. I don't see how the Promise driver could be implicated when I'm playing from my CD-RW driver. Yesterday I tried disabling Norton Autoprotect and the problem persisted so I concluded that virus protection wasn't involved. Of course, I could maybe disable it in a persistent fashion and reboot and maybe that would do it. Or I could uninstall Norton completely, not a big deal. I think the next step is to restore my Win2000 Ghost image and see what's what. Still, I want to know what it is so I can stop it if it happens again.

 

[Zepper]

BTW, I've been using Mozilla for some time, but recently it has started crashing regularly - often with a page fault in the gklayout.dll module.. But it has also happened in an 'unknown' module and in the Win kernel. I'm using it on Win98SE. If it wasn't crashing all the time I'd be mucho happy with it. Few if any of MS's security issues... I just DL'd and installed Netscape 7.0 which is based on Moz. 1.01 to see if it is less buggy.
.bh.
:disgust:

 

[networkman]

PS/2 ports should be IRQ 12 - make sure you haven't got that allocated as an available IRQ for something else.

 

[Muse]

Originally posted by: networkman
PS/2 ports should be IRQ 12 - make sure you haven't got that allocated as an available IRQ for something else.

This is embarassing but I had the KB pluged into the mouse PS/2 connector. The lights flashed but no response from KB. The instability I was having is now gone. Reverting to the previous version of the Win2000 Promise TX2 Ultra100 IDE controller driver stopped the mouse jumping and distortion when playing known good MP3 files from the HD or even from CD-RW's (packet written). To me it seems like a "bug" in the driver, but they claim to be unaware of it. Other's have experienced similar instability with the new 2.0.0.34 driver.