No keyboard input after boot loader

[nocturne yoke]

I recently did a system upgrade pacman -Syu . All seemed well until about a half hour later when the computer suddenly shutdown. My keyboard works when the bootloader displays (rEFInd), but then when I'm taken to the login screen, no keyboard input is accepted. I don't use a login manager, it's just the default login text prompt. Neither my USB keyboard or the keyboard that's built into my laptop produce any input when trying to type my username. I notice that the cursor blinks faster if I hold 'f2'. Any ideas about what I can try? I didn't see anyone else on google with this problem

[nocturne yoke]

When I make a bootable arch USB, the keyboard works, but I'm not sure how to diagnose and repair the issue with the actual install

[lunar canyon]

does it work on portal usb isos?

[nocturne yoke]

Yeah, the keybkard works when I boot from USB

[ornate linden]

do you have keyboard in your mkinitcpio hooks in /etc/mkinitcpio.conf?
e.g HOOKS=(base udev autodetect modconf block keyboard encrypt filesystems fsck)

otherwise you can boot the archiso usb, check for missing firmware.
have you installed linux-firmware?

Do you have any usb devices plugged in? try removing them and boot.

[nocturne yoke]

Thanks for the hints, I'll try them after work today

[buoyant junco]

Gozenka received a thank you cookie!

[lunar canyon]

can u go other tty?

[nocturne yoke]

How? ctrl + alt + f2?

[lunar canyon]

yea

[nocturne yoke]

Nah, I don't think it works. Weirdly, I can see the cursor blink at a different rate when I hit f2. But i don't notice any other difference

[lunar canyon]

so how ur suppost 2 test out the command? via archiso with chroot?

anything sus from jounalctl?

can u find ur mouse/keyboard from lsusb?

[nocturne yoke]

thanks, I will try these out after work today. one thing I noticed when booting with archiso that was an option in the boot loader, was that it takes me into a command line, no need to login, but the keyboard still doesn't work, and I see error messages about fsck and a device that pparently has no name, called ''

[buoyant junco]

littleblack111 received a thank you cookie!

[lunar canyon]

k np

[nocturne yoke]

so I was going to look into what fsck does after work and see what this unnamed thing is that might be causing problems

[lunar canyon]

are you being able to use ur keyboard during bootloader?

[lunar canyon]

yea sure go ahead

[lunar canyon]

would u like to paste it in a pastebin?

[nocturne yoke]

Yes, I will do so this evening. Thank you so much for taking the time to help

[buoyant junco]

You're thanking too much ó_ò

[lunar canyon]

np, hope it get fixed soon

[nocturne yoke]

:: running early hook [udev]
Starting systemd-udevd version 253.3-3-arch
:: running hook [udev]
:: Triggering uvenets..
:: running hook [keymap]
:: Loading keymap..done.
ERROR: device '' not found.  Skipping fsck.
:: mount '' on real root
mount: /new_root no filesystem type specified.
You are now being dropped into an emergency shell.
sh: can't access tty; job control turned off

That's what it says when I select archiso from the boot loader, and the keyboard doesn't work. When I load from USB, the keyboard works and I count mount sda2 to look at my filesystem, but I'm not sure what I need to do with it to get the keyboard working again

[nocturne yoke]

keyboard is in my HOOKS, and I do have the linux-firmware package installed. I noticed that keyboard is one of the last hooks

tried looking in journalctf but I don't really know what I'm looking for 🤔 I didn't seee anything that was like "turning off keyboard"

[nocturne yoke]

Okay, I just noticed that using the numpad will actually move the cursor around on the login screen

And when I turn NumLock on, I am able to type numbers into the prompt

However, the rest of the keyboard doesn't work

It's behaving really strangely, all the numbers i typed just ranomdly disappeared from the prompt

[ornate linden]

I thought of this for a moment but then disregarded the idea: It might be a keymap thing?
The keyboard works, but the keymap is all wrong and the keys do not get interpreted as characters?

[nocturne yoke]

I think I am using the linux with two alts keymap, if I recall correctly (happened to stumble on that this afternoon while looking into stuff)

Maybe I can try switching it to something else and see if that fixes it

[ornate linden]

Check this maybe: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Linux_console/Keyboard_configuration#Persistent_configuration

two alts?

when I select archiso from the boot loader
When I load from USB
btw what do you mean by these cases? I don't really understand.

[nocturne yoke]

my /etc/vconsole.conf is:
KEYMAP=/usr/local/share/kbd/keymaps/personal.map

That personal.map file is:
include "linux-with-two-alt-keys"

[nocturne yoke]

Sorry I don't really know what the right terminology is 😅

when I slect archiso from the boot loader = my boot loader has like a fallback image or something I can select to try and run, but it has the same problem and also fails to run fsck

when I load from USB = I created an arch linux installation USB and I am using that to poke around in my old filesystem to try and find what's wrong

[ornate linden]

oh, so you mean your actual installed system, when you say select from bootloader.

[ornate linden]

ok i think this might be the issue.

remove all that.

[nocturne yoke]

Just get rid of it all?

like, delete the files?

[ornate linden]

well i don't know what the default of it was

need to turn it back to default

[nocturne yoke]

Okay, I'll look for the default

thanks for the suggestion

[ornate linden]

i think you followed the instructions from a post for the alt-key functionality, but you do not actually have the linux-with-two-alt-keys to be included, so you are setting "no keys" for your keyboard.

that's what i imagine happening

[nocturne yoke]

I checked and I do have the "linux-with-two-alt-keys.inc" file on the system

[ornate linden]

oh

what does it look like?

cat it

[nocturne yoke]

include "linux-keys-bare"
keycode 100 = Alt

linux-keys-bare also exists, but has a ton of stuff in it

it doesn't look like it has keys for the letters though 🤔

[ornate linden]

👍 then it seems fine, as far as i understand this configuration.
but still, sounds like this is a probable cause to your issue.

[ornate linden]

yeah i just checked "bare" now too

and it has num lock and numpad keys defined

and f keys

so this fits your experience.

[nocturne yoke]

yep

Okay, so I need to also include a keymap file for the rest of the letters

[ornate linden]

i think that's it.
you are meant to add the US QWERTY or whatever keymap too

[nocturne yoke]

I am getting excited, this is the first thing that has made sense in awhile

Let me try and do this

[ornate linden]

but i would recommend setting the alt-key functionality some other way, if you won't be using it in tty

you can probably do the same in your graphical session too.
for instance, xorg has options to reassign certain keys. i change my "menu" key to the right of AltGr to work as Super key.

[nocturne yoke]

This is definitely the problem, I added include qwerty-layout and now I can type my username but still can't hit enter

so I just need to figure out these keymaps and I should be good to go

thank you so much, I really appreciate your help

[lunar canyon]

try running fsck manully

so u can go to other tty?

[nocturne yoke]

hey littleblack, it turns out the issue was with keymaps. thanks for taking the time to help

[lunar canyon]

hi