[SOLVED] Laptop's Internal Keyboard Doesn't Work During Boot

petervaro · 2026-07-10 18:42:39

I have a fairly old laptop I'm trying to revive, an ASUS x205ta. According to the wiki, everything is supposed to work just fine, however, I'm having difficulties with its (internal) keyboard.

In the BIOS the keyboard works just fine. When the boot starts from the installation medium, a USB pendrive, during the installation method selection the keyboard does not work, i.e. neither the arrow, nor the enter keys are registered, but after the initial 14 seconds countdown finishes and therefore the default method is selected, the keyboard starts working once more.

From there, I successfully installed everything as I've been doing dozens of times on other machines in the last decade and a half. My configuration is very simple here, I have two partitions, a boot and a root. The bootmanager is systemd-boot. I encrypted the root and use the sd-encrypt hook to decrypt it during boot, which is configured in /etc/crypttab.initramfs as follows.

root    UUID=<uuid>    none    luks,password-echo=no

The hooks enabled in /etc/mkinitcpio.conf are as follows.

HOOKS=(base systemd autodetect microcode modconf kms keyboard keymap sd-vconsole block sd-encrypt filesystems fsck)

After I power on the machine, the boot starts, the relevant modules are loaded, it finally gets to the decryption and mounting of the root, however, as the keyboard is not working the password could not be entered. After the prompt reaches the default timeout and the 'emergency mode' starts, it asks for further input on how to proceed, but even at this point the keyboard still does not work.

It appears to me, that some firmware or module is not loaded at the right time, or perhaps something that is already loaded somehow blocks the keyboard to be detected.

(Kernel version is 7.0.14-arch1-1 on the installation medium and 7.1.3-arch1-1 installed on the machine and, of course, every package is the latest as of publishing this post.)

Any thoughts on what I might be missing or what to test next?

Last edited by petervaro (2026-07-10 20:47:36)

seth · 2026-07-10 19:14:46

Can you unlock the system w/ and external keyboard and boot?
Check "lsmod" and compare that to "lsinitcpio /boot/initramfs-linux.img"
Randomly finding https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=227212 some asus module (hid-asus, asus-wmi, asus-laptop, asus-nb-wmi) seems to be important to "fix up" the device.

petervaro · 2026-07-10 19:55:33

Can you unlock the system w/ and external keyboard and boot?

Yes, and by the time the login appears, the internal keyboard also works.

Check "lsmod" and compare that to "lsinitcpio /boot/initramfs-linux.img"

In the /boot/initramfs-linux.img I found hid-asus, asus-wmi, but after booting the list of loaded modules contain not only these but also asus-nb-wmi, asus-armoury, and asus-wireless (though no asus-laptop). I added all of them to MODULES in /etc/mkinitcpio.conf, alas, it still does not work and I have to use the external keyboard to put the password in.

Any other thoughts?

seth · 2026-07-10 20:09:43

Check the system journal - there's gonna be something keyboard/serio/i8042/usb/… related after the root switch that indicates "the keyboard now works"

petervaro · 2026-07-10 20:36:14

I couldn't find such expression anywhere, the only thing I did find regarding keyboards is this:

kernel: asus 0018:0B05:8585.0003: input,hidraw2: I2C HID v1.00 Keyboard [PDEC3393:00 0B05:8585] on i2c-PDEC3393:00

With that in mind I had another look at the loaded modules and compared that with the ones in the initramfs and I found that i2c-hid i2c-hid-acpi were missing, so I added these to the MODULES too. And guess what, that did the trick!

Thank you for the hints on where to look.

seth · 2026-07-10 20:46:07

\o/
Please always remember to mark resolved threads by editing your initial posts subject - so others will know that there's no task left, but maybe a solution to find.
Thanks.

Arch Linux

#1 2026-07-10 18:42:39

[SOLVED] Laptop's Internal Keyboard Doesn't Work During Boot

#2 2026-07-10 19:14:46

Re: [SOLVED] Laptop's Internal Keyboard Doesn't Work During Boot

#3 2026-07-10 19:55:33

Re: [SOLVED] Laptop's Internal Keyboard Doesn't Work During Boot

#4 2026-07-10 20:09:43

Re: [SOLVED] Laptop's Internal Keyboard Doesn't Work During Boot

#5 2026-07-10 20:36:14

Re: [SOLVED] Laptop's Internal Keyboard Doesn't Work During Boot

#6 2026-07-10 20:46:07

Re: [SOLVED] Laptop's Internal Keyboard Doesn't Work During Boot

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