Arch Linux

curz46

Member

Registered: 2017-11-16

Posts: 3

Razer BlackWidow Chroma not working when booting Arch

[SOLVED]

- Suddenly, keyboard no longer working. I am not able to test another keyboard (I don't have any spare).
- I have tried using different ports and disabling/enabling different combinations of legacy support USB BIOS settings.
- I believe the cause to be updating but I am no longer sure.
- I have reinstalled the partition several times by now, once with up-to-date packages and twice with the whole system downgraded to various dates, one just before I installed the system initially (and it worked) and one several months before.
- Many errors messages used to be displayed but they no longer occur.
- I have checked dmesg for errors and my keyboard is recognised and loaded.
- I can control the keyboard while on the BIOS loading page and in the boot manager, including changing the numlock and caps lock glowing indicators.
- When the system reaches the login page, the lights flash off and then back on and the state of the numlock and caps lock indicators is retained in the keyboard's memory, but I am no longer able to change the state (caps lock won't work). No keys will work and I am therefore unable to login.

Interestingly, my keyboard appears to do the same thing (not usable, numlock won't change) when I boot into Windows, but on the lock screen in 3-4 seconds the keyboard and mouse flash off and on again once more and then it becomes usable. This obviously doesn't occur on Arch.

I reinstalled the partition by booting onto an installation iso on my laptop (not the computer the partition is on) and using pacstrap to install the base packages. This is because the firmware for my computer's wireless card is not supported without installing broadcom-wl, and I have no access to ethernet to do so. I install the packages onto a partition on the usb and then copy all of the files on the usb's partition onto my computer's partition, again through the iso, after formatting the partition with mkfs.ext4 (following the wiki). This worked the first time I did it but I cannot make it work again. I downgraded the packages by changing the mirrorlink file to only have one entry, Server=https://archive.archlinux.org/repos/2017/xx/xx/$repo/os/$arch and running pacman -Syyuu through arch-chroot. The pacman cli says that it downgrades packages, but no matter what I do the login page will say 4.13.11-1-ARCH as the version whether updated or downgraded.

It's very possible that I have not entirely understood what I am doing when attempting to fix this problem, so if I appear to have done something wrong please correct me. I'm willing to give more details should it be necessary. Thanks.

Last edited by curz46 (2017-11-17 17:31:10)

seth

Member

Registered: 2012-09-03

Posts: 50,927

Re: Razer BlackWidow Chroma not working when booting Arch

What if you don't boot a graphical target?
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Sy … _boot_into (you want the multi-user.target)

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curz46

Member

Registered: 2017-11-16

Posts: 3

Re: Razer BlackWidow Chroma not working when booting Arch

Hi seth, thanks for answering.
I just tried your suggestion and it appears to have no affect on how the system boots and the keyboard not working. I also tried using an invalid target, which put it in recovery and although different, also does not allow me to use the keyboard. Have you got any other ideas?

Thanks

loqs

Member

Registered: 2014-03-06

Posts: 17,305

Re: Razer BlackWidow Chroma not working when booting Arch

The pacman cli says that it downgrades packages, but no matter what I do the login page will say 4.13.11-1-ARCH as the version whether updated or downgraded.

Does the system have a separate /boot partition?  Is it mounted when the kernel is updated?
From the installation media chroot in and what is the output of?

pacman -Q linux
uname -a

curz46

Member

Registered: 2017-11-16

Posts: 3

Re: Razer BlackWidow Chroma not working when booting Arch

The pacman cli says that it downgrades packages, but no matter what I do the login page will say 4.13.11-1-ARCH as the version whether updated or downgraded.

Does the system have a separate /boot partition?  Is it mounted when the kernel is updated?

You're a legend! My "/boot" partition is on an entirely different drive to the Arch partition because I have no space on my SSD (Windows dual-boot). I completely forgot that Linux firmware relies on files in this /boot partition, which was why upgrading/downgrading the firmware had no effect (it was putting the files into the directory /boot which meant nothing on my laptop or my pc) and from what I can assume why the firmware update failed in the first place. I will have to remember to setup /boot to automatically mount my EFI partition.

I will mark this thread as solved. If you're having similar hardware issues as a result of upgrading arch firmware and you haven't setup /boot to map to your boot partition, the solution is to copy the files created in the /boot directory onto your actual boot partition. The permanent fix is to set Linux to mount it automatically. I will have to find out how to do that.

Thanks!

edit: I have no idea how to mark this as solved, or if I even can, so I just put something at the top.

Last edited by curz46 (2017-11-17 17:31:41)

mrunion

Member

From: Jonesborough, TN

Registered: 2007-01-26

Posts: 1,938

Website

Re: Razer BlackWidow Chroma not working when booting Arch

To mark as SOLVED, just edit your first post and prepend [SOLVED] to the title line.

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Matt

"It is very difficult to educate the educated."