Remember the Sherlock Holmes short story about the dog that didn’t bark? Read on.
A few days ago I booted a seldom-used workstation so that I could run an infrequently-used app. It went through the POST, but hung after that, with a blinking underscore cursor in the upper left corner of the screen. No SCSI BIOS. No RAID controller screen. Just black with a little white blinker.
I gave the machine the three-finger salute and managed to get it into the BIOS diagnostics. They took about eight hours to run. It didn’t seem to find anything, but I saw no completion screen at the end, just blackness.
I started to unplug things, boot up, and shut down, trying to figure out if some peripheral was causing the problem. When I unplugged the keyboard, the computer booted properly. “Bad keyboard,” I thought, and unplugged it. I started to pick the keyboard itself up off the pivoting keyboard tray, and it was stuck. I looked carefully. The upper left corner of the keyboard was jammed against the lower side of the desk, and the desk was holding down the Escape key.
I lowered the keyboard tray, plugged in the keyboard, and all was well.
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