Asus P8Z77-V PRO keyboard and mouse inoperative at POST – won’t let you into BIOS/RAID setup

Asus P8Z77-V PRO keyboard and mouse inoperative at POST – won’t let you into BIOS/RAID setup

I wasted WAY to much time on this absolutely poor product validation problem.

I have an old Asus P8P67 motherboard that I suspected had a bug with it’s RAID controller hardware/firmware.  I would nightly put the machine into sleep mode, but when I’d wake the machine from sleep the next day the hard drives would start reset clicking and timing out madly.  It was so bad, you’d get 2-5 second delays just trying to access a file.  But if you rebooted, even a warm reboot, the drive would stop its schizophrenic timing out and run smoothly.  Further, it was always the third drive in the raid, even though I’d hot swapped the drive several times and the drives would be flawless when not in the RAID set.

Fortuitously, Fry’s had a sale on the new P8Z77-V Pro motherboards.  However, when I installed the motherboard, I had a different problem.  The machine started up first try without a problem, and I set the SATA mode to RAID so I would get the ‘Press <CTRL-I>to enter configuration utility…’ BIOS message and set up the hardware RAID.  The funny thing was, the message would pop up and I’d frantically press CTRL-I, but to no avail.  It was like it was ignoring me.  I tried turning on USB legacy mode and other USB settings and noticed strange things with the keyboard lights not always coming on/etc.

So, what do I do?  In searching forums, I found that other people were having even worse problems.  Some couldn’t even enter the UEFI BIOS setup at all. When I got my machine to boot into windows, they keyboards didn’t work at all.  I try plugging in another USB keyboard. I have a Logitech G15 and a no-name generic one. Initially, no luck, but I do notice the behavior of the keyboard change. I would toggling the scroll/caps/num locks during BIOS setup and sometimes the I can see both keyboards toggle the light correctly, and other times do not.

I try all the different USB ports. The rear, onboard ones fared the worst. They never worked for the RAID BIOS. Even in windows, the keyboard and mouse would sometimes not work at all depending on which port I had them plugged into. The ones on back that seemed to work best? The top usb port above the green outlined USB flashback port. Still, I cannot enter RAID setup, but windows sees my USB device correctly at startup.

Now, I leave one keyboard plugged into that top port, and then start playing with the headers on the motherboard. I take the USB backplane extender and start plugging it into the headers on the board. You know what? Each one acts differently! However, when I have it plugged into the front-most plug, the one closest the reset/power switches – THEN IT WORKS! You can then press CTRL-I and it registers.

Strangely enough, once you get the machine booted, then all the USB ports work perfectly.  But not while you’re in POST.

All I have to say is HFS – this is BUSTED ASUS. I’ll be sending in a trouble ticket this afternoon. Please let me know if this works for you.

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