Ubuntu hangs during startup with plugged in USB mouse/keyboard

[Edwin Wong]

This problem exits in both Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty) and Ubuntu 9.10 Alpha 6 (Karmic).

Ubuntu hangs during startup with if I have either a USB mouse or keyboard plugged in. My current workaround is to have both plugged into their respective PS/2 ports. This only happens with a USB mouse or keyboard plugged in, boot is fine if I have a USB memory key plugged in, for example.

The problem manifests itself in different ways depending on boot options and version of Ubuntu. To sum up:

32-bit text install CD - hangs at Choose Language page
32-bit text install CD with acpi=off - the error message "powernow-k8: Your BIOS does not provide ACPI _PSS objects in a way that Linux understands. Please report this to the Linux ACPI maintainers and complain to your BIOS vendor" flashes, then install hangs at Choose Language page
32-bit regular install CD - hangs with the message "Starting bluetooth"
32-bit regular install CD with acpi=off - eventually get the first install desktop page but system hangs, mouse and keyboard unresponsive

My hardware:

AMD Athlon 64 X2 3800+ processor
Asus M2NPV-VM motherboard (GeForce 6150 NForce 430 chipset) - flashed with the latest BIOS version 1401 dated 2008/08/25
4 GB RAM
eVGA GeForce 8800 GT PCI-e video card

I'm guessing the "ACPI _PSS objects" error message appears to be most informative one. If the problem is the BIOS provided with my motherboard, how should I report this problem to Asus so that it gets fixed? Any patches or updates I could do to fix this problem on my system? Thanks!

[Miloš Mandarić (mandzo18)]

Pretty old BIOS bug and we can't do nothing about it https://bugs.launchpad.net/linux/+bug/36583

[Edwin Wong (wong-edwin)]

Thanks for confirming that it's a BIOS bug. Did some more research based on this information, found out that Fedora was not booting up on this motherboard a couple years back. Just in case anybody comes across this problem, the fix was to downgrade the BIOS to the 0504 one on the Asus website (provided your CPU is supported by the older BIOS). Everything works fine now, this bug can be marked as "won't fix", thanks.