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Makosuke

macrumors 604
Original poster
Aug 15, 2001
6,661
1,242
The Cool Part of CA, USA
This is a tip that a bunch of Googling failed to come up with any suggestions on, so I thought I'd mention it in case it's actually unusual, rather than keyword-overlap with other, more common problems.

What happened: I was trying to install Windows XP along side a completely fresh 10.6 install via Boot Camp. I screwed up in the Windows installer--deleted and recreated the Windows partition instead of reformatting it--so Windows failed to start.

No problem, I'll just reboot into the MacOS, repartition, and try again.

Except the Mac would NOT respond to the keyboard at all--holding down Option, Command-Option-P-R, X, C, or any other key combination was completely ignored--it just attempted to boot into Windows and failed at a missing file. It didn't respond within that brief Windows boot attempt, either--"pressing any key to boot from CD" didn't work, nor did ctrl-alt-del, and no response from Caps Lock.

The keyboard (an aluminum extended, wired, brand new) tested fine on the Mac next to it, and plugging the mouse into the computer directly to hold down the button, forcing a disc eject, proved the ports were OK.

Finally I dug an old USB Dell keyboard out of my junk drawer, and--lo and behold--it worked perfectly. Holding down Alt brought up the boot selector as expected. After booting into the MacOS, the Aluminum keyboard worked fine, and on a proper Windows install it also works fine.

The only mildly abnormal thing about the setup is that the Mac is a 2nd gen 17" Intel iMac, which didn't ship with the aluminum keyboard originally. Bottom line being that, for some reason, apparently the Mac will completely ignore certain keyboards after a failed Boot Camp install, and the fix is to try another one.

Weird.
 
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