# i8042.c Can't read CTR-No keyboard

## prr56

I have an ABIT IC7-G w/ P4 3.0E running kernel 2.6.9_rc3 and everything was fine until yesterday morning. I have been running this kernel with great success for a month until yesterday. When you boot up and get to the login in line the keyboard is dead. I sshed into it and read dmesg and it read out "i8042.c Can't read CTR while initializing i8042". I googled it and came up with some patches for kernels, but nothing to explain why this happened overnite? I still haven't been able to repair and if anyone has any ideas, please let me know.

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## NeddySeagoon

prr56,

In days of old, the IBM PC used a chip called i8042 for a keyboard controller. The chip has long gone as a seperate chip but the interface has remained.

Without googling for the datasheet, the CTR will be an internal register in the i8042, which needs to be set to configure it.

This suggests that either your keyboard is dead (try it on another PC) or your motherboard is dead. Try no keyboard at all then another keyboard. You may have to set the BIOS to ignore errors to boot with no keyboard.

Can you get into the BIOS with your existing setup because the BIOS needs to set up the keyboard controller too.

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## prr56

Thanks for your reply Neddy. I did swap keyboards as a first resort and I had the same problem. What I finally did was install the 2.6.8.1 kernel and everything is happy. This really bugged me and I still haven't really found out why.

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## VinzC

Did you check for legacy USB keyboard/mouse in your BIOS? I've had the same problem since I wanted to add vesa frame buffer into my kernel. I never had a problem before. I just disabled legacy USB mouse (I had enabled it loooong ago, probably to see what would happen and forgot about it).

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