Jimbo

I've an old (~4 years) computer that I've hooked up to my TV for playing media. A short while back it suddenly refused to boot. It's running WinXP, and while it's still doing whatever it does to boot up, it will blue screen (too quickly to read) and restart.

I figured this wouldn't be a big deal. I put in a WinXP CD, went into the BIOS and verified my boot device order, and then figured I could just repair the Windows install. However - and this is where it gets weird - when my BIOS shows the option to "press any key to boot from CD...", it doesn't respond to keyboard input. Right after that, it goes to Windows' screen saying "windows didn't boot right last time blah blah, do you want to boot into safe mode or normal?" but that doesn't respond to the keyboard either. The only thing that does, is the actual BIOS settings.

I'm clueless as to how the machine got into this condition or how to get it out. Any ideas how to even debug the issue?

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Jabo

If it's a usb keyboard, move it to a different port. Also, make sure legacy usb is enabled in bios (might be called something else). If you installed windows with recovery enabled, the disk isn't even needed, just press F8 when it's booting (at the first splash screen, right after the memory check) to get the boot menu. If the keyboard still don't work, try another keyboard.

Adak

Your keyboard can be handled by either the WindowsXP OS, or by the BIOS, during boot-up.

If it's handled by the OS, then it remains inoperative until after the Windows logo is printed on the screen, which is too late for your purposes.

So in your BIOS, go into the Peripheral Devices page, and change the set up to BIOS handles the keyboard. Now you'll have control of the keyboard early on. You may have a driver interrupt problem with another device (but who cares), because this is not allowing Windows to use it's magic to assign sharing, etc.

After you've got the boot up problem fixed, you may want/need to reset it so that windows is again managing the keyboard on start up.

I've had this situation on many rigs, and moving the usb to another connector won't help. Using another keyboard will not help. This isn't "weird" - it's normal.

If you're still stuck Jimbo, let me know and I'll give you exact detailed instructions that I use for my rigs.

Jabo

Thank you for reinforcing what I said Adak.

Jimbo

Thanks guys, it was the legacy USB support. Curious that it would work to modify BIOS settings but not boot of a CD, but someone must have had a reason for the design. The rest of the problem was a corrupted disk (yay for chkdsk).

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