Boot time virus check and USB keyboard

Hi there!

First of all - thanks for a great and solid product.
Yesterday, I’ve installed avast at a friend’s PC, and run into a strange little quirk with Boot time virus checking.
Apparently, the boot time virus checker did not recognize the USB keyboard connected to the machine, which
led to me not being able to enter an option when an infected file was found; only short-term solution seemed
to be to connect an old PS2-keyboard, and go back to square 1. :wink:

While I realize that this is probably not your fault - the USB keyboard is probably not recognized before Windows
is booted up completely - I still feel you should know about this. After all, USB keyboards will show up quite often with new machines , and not everyone will have an old PS2-style keyboard at hand.

Just wanted to bring this to your attention (and accept my apologies if this has been discussed before on
this board.)

All the best
Michael

USB drivers are normally loaded by windows, so before windows loads no usb keyboard. This can be rectified by changing the BIOS settings to enable USB devices at boot.

You have to enable USB devices in your BIOS, you need to boot and interrupt the boot by pressing the delete or esc key (depends on your Mother board). Once you get into the BIOS you need to find the bit that covers USB devices, possibly Integrated Devices or Peripherals, but this again depends on maker of the BIOS chip. You will have to search around for it and enable USB on boot.

Oh and you’ve guessed it you will probably need to connect your PS2 keyboard before this exercise. If you system was bought with a USB keyboard the manufacturer should really have changed the bios setting. There are so few occasions when you are likely to need a keyboard outside of windows, they probably didn’t bother or never thought about it.

Your right, it has been covered before, a forum search for ‘USB keyboard boot’ without the quotes returns many hits.

Thanks for the quick reply, and thanks for the pointer to BIOS settings.

All the best
Michael

Glad I could help, welcome to the forums.