Hi Macrumors,
I come to you today with some really bizarre behaviour on an old white Macbook from 2009 or so. I know nothing of its background, besides the fact that it was bought in Switzerland, judging by its Swiss-French keyboard layout. Yes, that information is actually relevant, because here's the crux:
The keyboard behaves odd, persistently, accross reinstalls, recovery partitions and external boot disks. That means that no matter what way or version of OS X this thing was booted from, the following was always the case:
- the [0] key doesn't work at all (neither its modifier-key combo's)
- the [->] arrow functions as [enter] or [return]
I come to you today with some really bizarre behaviour on an old white Macbook from 2009 or so. I know nothing of its background, besides the fact that it was bought in Switzerland, judging by its Swiss-French keyboard layout. Yes, that information is actually relevant, because here's the crux:
The keyboard behaves odd, persistently, accross reinstalls, recovery partitions and external boot disks. That means that no matter what way or version of OS X this thing was booted from, the following was always the case:
- the [0] key doesn't work at all (neither its modifier-key combo's)
- the [->] arrow functions as [enter] or [return]
- the [up] arrow is [$]
- the [$] key is [$]+"goto beginning of line"
Now, pardon my french, but what the actual *** is that for a keyboard layout? How does that even remotely make any sense? And more bizzarely, how does it persist accross all the stuff I've been doing to that HDD? I think I must've erased/partitioned it a few times now...
I'd assume it were a rootkit if it weren't for the fact that, well, frankly why would you write such an obvious/interfering rootkit?
Additionally:
- There's no startup chime, even after SMC and NVRAM reset
- The Macbook doesn't listen to any keys on boot, except for the Alt-option key. That means I am not able to run hardware tests, verbose mode and that kind of stuff. I did the NVRAM reset by setting its argument in the terminal before rebooting (nvram -c if I recall correctly).
Anyone wanna take a swing at this one?
I'll be updating this post as I go along toying around with this thing.
EDIT 1: Been talking to a friend of mine, he suggested that it might be because the keyboard's had some fluids over it. It would make sense that it's a hardware problem, given that it persists across everything so far. Have been unable to run Apple Hardware tests so far, but this sounds like the best option so far.
- the [$] key is [$]+"goto beginning of line"
Now, pardon my french, but what the actual *** is that for a keyboard layout? How does that even remotely make any sense? And more bizzarely, how does it persist accross all the stuff I've been doing to that HDD? I think I must've erased/partitioned it a few times now...
I'd assume it were a rootkit if it weren't for the fact that, well, frankly why would you write such an obvious/interfering rootkit?
Additionally:
- There's no startup chime, even after SMC and NVRAM reset
- The Macbook doesn't listen to any keys on boot, except for the Alt-option key. That means I am not able to run hardware tests, verbose mode and that kind of stuff. I did the NVRAM reset by setting its argument in the terminal before rebooting (nvram -c if I recall correctly).
Anyone wanna take a swing at this one?
I'll be updating this post as I go along toying around with this thing.
EDIT 1: Been talking to a friend of mine, he suggested that it might be because the keyboard's had some fluids over it. It would make sense that it's a hardware problem, given that it persists across everything so far. Have been unable to run Apple Hardware tests so far, but this sounds like the best option so far.
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