Hi there

I'm having some freaky problems with my laptop. I'll first give a discription of my system and then the problem. My system is:

acer aspire 5100 laptop.
OS : opensuse 10.1

okay my problem is hard for me to formulate, but im going to give it a go.

My laptops keyboard has stopped responding on boot. That is, i cannot choose to enter setup in the bios and cannot choose which OS i want to boot from in grub. When opensuse does boot(the time to choose an OS in grub has run out and opensuse is automatically chosen) i have response from my keyboard, but my touchpad responds in jitters or is delayed.

okay please bare with me, now it gets hard for me.

I originally had opensuse 10.2 and windows installed on my laptop. Both worked flawlessly. Oneday my son was watching a DVD in windows and the system froze. I rebooted only to find that i had no response from my keyboard and touchpad. I had windows selected as default boot( my wife often uses the laptop ) so i had to remove the harddrive and edit the menu.lst file on another computer so that opensuse would boot automatically. Lo and behold my keyboard and touchpad responded under suse, except that the touchpad responded in delays or jitters. I couldn't get the system properly working again.. until, the next day the system froze again, and, when i had rebooted, i could once again use the keyboard and touchpad properley and they responses on boot.

Now this problem has occured again, but this time it happened without the system freezing. it has now been almost two weeks since the problem resurfaced.

live gentoo 2005, opensuse 10.2, 10.1 all allow me to use the keyboard and touchpad (in jitters), windows does not, trying to install opensuse 10.3 alpha 5 does not work, i have no response from the keyboard in the setup windows. However in the 10.2 setup i do have response. booting from gentoo 2007 live cd i also have no response.

Now i remember reading somewhere that linux sometimes rewrites pieces of the bios. Im not sure wether this is true, or not, but the fact that the older versions of linux work(not 100%) and that they all have older kernel versions, led me to believe that perhaps suse had written something to the bios which has stopped my keyboard from responding on boot.

please if anyone could confirm this.. or even rip me to pieces for believing in myths or even better has a solution, could they reply.

thank you in advance,
Wernher

edit: i forgot to mention that my USB ports are not responding either, regardless of wether i am in opensuse 10.2 or an OS were my keyboard and touchpad dont respond at all.

anyone have any ideas?

bump