[ale] Boot issues

[Scott Castaline]

I'm now leaning towards hardware being the culprit with my boot with USB 
keyboard. I thought I had finally resolved it with setting USB to Legacy 
and disabling ACPI 2.0 Support in the BIOS, as it booted fine for a few 
days. I did one day have to reboot to get it to boot. Today it took me a 
half hour to get it to boot. I had even tried an old PS/2 keyboard which 
gave me the same results. I then switched back to my USB and went into 
the BIOS going through everything to see if something had changed as was 
the case one time before. When I exited with a save the system powered 
down and then about 10 seconds later powered back up itself and booted fine.

As a reminder my problem was that the BIOS reports seeing an USB 
keyboard and USB mouse. The BIOS then goes to a countdown to boot OS (to 
allow time to enter ASUS Express i guess) which I hit ESC to skip which 
does work then I had changed the grub.conf to not hide the menu and 15 
sec delay which that sees the Enter response from the keyboard and goes 
on. It's when it asks for my passphrase to unlock my devices that I 
loose the keyboard. I usually hit the ESC key when I see the screen 
backlight shut off and my lighted keyboard turns off and just when it 
lights up again, this will switch the boot screen from graphic to text. 
If it comes up to the GUI passphrase box my keyboard is dead. I also 
can't get it to powerdown at shutdown.

So basically I'm just putting my feelers out for other opinions before I 
start with exchanging the MoBo or RMA'ing it to ASUS. Also if 
MicroCenter will exchange it, what's your opinion whether I should stay 
with ASUS or change to another Mfg. MoBo.