USB 2 Mouse and Keyboard become completely unresponsive after disk decrypted

User Support
1

My power flickered out last night while using my Qubes desktop and it shut down abruptly. When I tried to reboot I was able to enter in the disk encryption key successfully with the keyboard, but as soon as it (actually before that as the lights go out on my mouse prior to the screen coming up) boots to the GUI where you would enter in the user login the keyboard and the mouse become completely unresponsive. The cursor will not move. The keyboard will not work. I cannot even click numlock or caplock to get those leds to light up. I cannnot do anything to escape out to the command line as i have tried pounding control alt f3 soon after i enter the decryption key and nothing happens. I have tried 3 different keyboards (of 2 different models) and 3 different mice (of 2 differnet models). I have tried 2 keyboard and 2 mice a the same time. Hooking in 3 keyboard and 3 mice at the same tiem to see if ANY will pull up. I have tried randomly switching the USB ports they are in. If I have mulitple keyboards and mice in the RGB lighting all turns off about the same time before the GUI comes up, with the exception of the one I used to enter the disk encryption key (but it remains unresponsive, not even capslock will bring up capslock light on keyboard) - and on occasion that keyboard even loses RGB power. These devices all work. I can type in the decryption key on every keyboard. So it is not a hardware error. Just refuses to recognize them. Not upgraded to 4.3 yet (I like to wait until the bugs are worked out on any new upgrade) so this is the 4.2 I have been using a while. I did have trouble like this one time before I remember and it randomly started working again (don’t even know what i did other than trial and error). Any ideas? Is there some sort of recovery disk for Qubes we can use to decrypt the disk and figure out what is wrong after the disk is unencrypted?

Thanks in advance

2

Hi WorldTraveller

Can you try to edit the GRUB options (press e when you see the GRUB menu) and navigate to where it says quiet and replace it with qubes.skip_autostart?

:slight_smile:

3

Many thanks! That worked!

4

Hi WorldTraveller :slight_smile:

Great! – to help the next user (with a similar problem), would you be willing to mark the problem as “solved”?

:slight_smile:

5

Sure, I was actually looking for something like that earlier but did not see it only the Share Bookmark Flag and Reply. Now I see it and can mark it. One other thing though. I have rebooted a couple of times now, and it will not go back to the way it was behaving before - working normally in quiet mode without having to modify the grub config file. Now I have to press e and go in and manually make that change every time which is sort of a pain. Is there a way to permanently turn off quiet mode or just get it back to the way it was working before without having to modify anything?

Thanks in Advance

6

Never mind. I tried to boot one of my qubes and they were not starting due to an IOMMU error. When I went into the BIOS i got a message that it had been reset (I am guessing due to the power fluctuation?). When I reset the BIOS to work with Qubes again I had no problems booting normally.

Thank you again for your help.

1 Like
7

Hi WorldTraveller :slight_smile:

quiet isn’t the culprit – you can leave it in the config … it’s just the easy way to find the right place to add qubes.skip_autostart :wink:

Once the machine is booted and you can login to Qubes, you can also start debugging what it is that tries to start and somehow captures your mouse/keyboard and prevents them from working. :-/

Edit: Our posts crossed in-flight – nice that you found the reason and solution!! :slight_smile:

:slight_smile: