Comment 7 for bug 903306

I have a desktop with USB keyboard & mouse, and a motherboard (MSI G31M3) that intermittently (around 1 boot in 15) fails to initialise USB correctly in the BIOS. Unplugging and re-plugging USB devices doesn't help, the whole subsystem is non-functional, the only thing that works is to reboot.

For those boots when I have no functioning input device, in Ubuntu 11.04 and before, the power button on the case was my input device, because it could be pressed briefly, and the computer would then shut itself down cleanly after 60 seconds, and then I could boot again normally, and the USB problem was easily worked around. But from 11.10 onwards, this no longer works, so all I can do is a forced power-off, with resulting possible disk data corruption problems. It would be really good to have this functionality back.