Patch Lady – recovery options fun

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We’re in the process of redoing our Kitchen at home and we’re staying at my Dad’s house during the remodeling process.  With the kitchen being right s
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Susan Bradley Patch Lady/Prudent patcher

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ve2mrx, Elly, JohnW, SueW, GreatAndPowerfulTech, Seff, Ed, Morty, woody, PhotM

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Exactly.

And with the newer models… well you never know what the fallback methods will be. Except on laptop it’s usually the builtin screen… but not always.

On one system with no VGA connector, only DisplayPort and DVI, the recovery screen was only up on DVI. On another, only DisplayPort. And…

It might even depend on system firmware versions. Especially on servers not having “good enough” graphics might even mean you get something on the serial port. (Fairly recent server models too, I was surprised… but don’t have to go all that far back to find that feature on some HP workstations too, for example.)

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Interesting story, thanks Susan.

It’s the same with keyboards. I had a problem a few years ago that necessitated me booting into Bios with the F8 key, and my all-singing and dancing back-lit modern keyboard wouldn’t do it because it wasn’t activated at the point where I was pressing F8. I had to switch in an old basic keyboard that was gathering dust in the garage and then it was fine.

So make sure you keep an old keyboard tucked away as well as a VGA monitor!

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SueW, Wheel_D, Ed

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Seff wrote:

It’s the same with keyboards. I had a problem a few years ago that necessitated me booting into Bios with the F8 key, and my all-singing and dancing back-lit modern keyboard wouldn’t do it because it wasn’t activated at the point where I was pressing F8.

I’ve seen the same with my Corsair K70 keyboard on my desktop PC with its Asus P8P67 motherboard (Sandy Bridge).  Sometimes the keyboard doesn’t get initialized by the UEFI and is not recognized when restarting from UEFI… but hitting the reset button and letting it POST again wakes the keyboard up and lets it work to go into the settings.

I don’t even have a PS/2 keyboard anymore, if that’s what you meant by basic keyboard.  I have a few basic USB ones, but since resetting works, I haven’t had to try them.

As for the original post:Don’t forget you can use your TV, if it is one of the models that has a VGA port.  My TV has a cathode ray tube and has only coax, S-video, and composite RCA inputs, so no good there, but most people probably have something a little newer.  The LCD TVs I’ve seen in motel rooms I’ve stayed in have usually had VGA ports.

My regular PC monitor still has a VGA port on it, though, so if I ever needed it, I’d be ready.  It’s not in use, but I still have a cable attached to it that’s wrapped up and secured to the desk, ready to use in a moment.  My video card doesn’t have a VGA port, though… if I want to use VGA, I have to use a DVI-I to VGA adapter.  I only have about 20 of the things!

My monitor, being a somewhat older model (though still 1080p, 23 inch, IPS), does not have a HDMI input, so I use a DVI-D to HDMI adapter on the monitor end and a regular HDMI cable from the video card’s HDMI port to there.  It’s thinner and lighter than the DVI cable, and allows me to quickly move the cable to any of my three newer laptops (Inspiron 11, Swift, G3), all of which have only HDMI ports.

If a laptop fails to use its built-in display for failure mode in favor of a port with nothing connected to it while under control of the UEFI/BIOS, I would consider that a defect.  That’s just weird!

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Seff

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Ascaris wrote:

I don’t even have a PS/2 keyboard anymore, if that’s what you meant by basic keyboard. I have a few basic USB ones, but since resetting works, I haven’t had to try them.

Well yeah. For some high-end (at the time) workstations though, you need a PS/2 keyboard to use the BIOS config screen. And since these were well built and powerful machines, they’re often enough still in use.

(On most of these, USB does work just fine once you have an operating system with the appropriate drivers running.)

Ascaris wrote:

If a laptop fails to use its built-in display for failure mode in favor of a port with nothing connected to it while under control of the UEFI/BIOS, I would consider that a defect. That’s just weird!

I thought so too. As in, thought it was quite weird. Doesn’t anyone else ever use laptops docked but without external displays?

I’ve come to the conclusion that laptop, dock and display behaviour just in general is sort of weird most of the time anyway… sheesh, just recently had a case with two different models from the same brand, same dock (officially supported with both) and attached devices, and screen switching behaviour completely opposite…

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mn– wrote:

For some high-end (at the time) workstations though, you need a PS/2 keyboard to use the BIOS config screen. And since these were well built and powerful machines, they’re often enough still in use.

At least if it is a known trait of these workstations, you’d know to have one on-hand, or to make sure you use a PS2 keyboard all the time.  If it’s in the manual, it’s not a bug!

I only switched away from PS2 keyboards because all of the ones I saw were USB models, and I had no specific reason to prefer PS2 models as in the above case.  I was skeptical at first, thinking outcomes like this would happen, but it’s worked pretty well over the years, other than the one issue I sometimes have (as described above) with my current desktop PC, where a reboot initiated from the UEFI (like if I’d changed a setting and selected save & exit) will often not initialize the keyboard (and possibly other USB devices, though the keyboard is the only one I am trying to use at that point).  Once the OS loads, the keyboard is once again activated and works normally, as you’d expect.

Reboots from the OS have never done this, to my memory.  It’s probably a glitch in the firmware, but it is so infrequent that it appears, and so easy to fix (hit reset) that I still really like the P8P67 motherboard.

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Yes, “PS/2” is the type of keyboard I was thinking of, I couldn’t remember but as soon as you mentioned “PS/2” a whole section of my computing past came back in an instant!

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Several months ago I also needed to boot into BIOS on a family member’s 8 year old ASUS desktop system after replacing a CMOS battery and I was unable to get the F keys to respond during POST using a plain old basic USB keyboard. I noticed this system has a PS2 connector on the board and after connecting a PS2 keyboard I was finally able to get into BIOS.

Good luck finding one of THOSE archaic things lying around… I almost tossed the one I found way in the back of a cupboard many times over the years!

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woody

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PS/2 keyboards have had a bit of revival in recent years after nearly disappearing from new computers marketed to consumers. (Throughout that period, I was able to find HP and Asus business-oriented desktop computers with PS/2 ports.)  The gamer community is largely responsible for the comeback, i.e., the PS/2 keyboard is better than a USB at N-key rollover etc.  Fast typists also value them.

A quick search finds this, for instance:

https://hardforum.com/threads/why-do-we-still-have-ps-2-ports-on-motherboards.1958326/

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That’s the entire point of a USB gaming keyboard like my K70 (unless it is one of the models that has extra keys, but mine isn’t one of those).  The n-key rollover issue showed itself a lot with cheap keyboards on FPS games, but that’s a limitation of the electronics in the keyboard, not the interface.  My K70 doesn’t have the rollover problem, and it further has a switchable polling interval to further reduce latency. It can go down to 1ms polling interval, down from a default interval of 8ms, if I recall correctly.

I know a lot of elite gamers do everything they can to reduce latency in everything, including using displays with as high a refresh rate as possible, but it’s beyond my perception… I simply don’t notice any difference.

The K70 also has mechanical keyswitches for the best feel possible, which is really nice for extended typing as well as gaming.  I do a lot more writing than I do gaming, and that’s really why I bought the gaming keyboard… because its advantages aren’t just for gaming.  It’s the same way with gaming laptops… they’re just powerful laptops with decent GPUs and strong cooling relative to office laptops.  There’s all kinds of things they would be good for other than gaming, but that’s how they’re marketed.

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Isn’t like cheap PS/2 keyboards wouldn’t have had problems. It’s just, no one bothered to keep those models around, it seems… and also it was easier to label one of those as defective because it was simpler to test.

With USB, the keyboard is isolated behind at least one more layer of abstraction and harder to classify as broken.

Nothing keeping people from making good USB keyboards at any point, if they’d chosen to – just that there was temporarily insufficient demand for those in the supply chain when stocks of good PS/2 keyboards lasted and were usable… and now we have the problem that good keyboards are labeled for “gaming” and come with all kinds of annoying things like extra blinking lights.

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Back to the cable for mouse and keyboard.

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