MacBook Air Keyboard Problem

I have a Macbook Air (1st gen) in my possession with a keyboard layout problem.

When I get to the login screen I can select the user I would like to log in as but can not type anything into the password box. I can hit the caps lock and the icon for the uppercase comes up in the login box.

Same thing when I go into safe mode (holding down the shift button after the startup chime.)

I added a usb keyboard. Same results.

I was able to log into single user mode by holding down Command+S. While in single user mode the keyboard works fine.

So I tried removing /var/db/.AppleSetupDone to go through the setup steps like a new user. I was able to reboot and start the setup process. When it came to setting my Keyboard Type the list was blank. I chose to show all and I had other languages (Chinese and the such) but no English. I also tried telling setup my location was United Kingdom and Canada and I still had blank entries.

Any other guesses? I’ve googled my butt off.

Specs:

Macbook Air 1,1
OS: 10.5.8
Kernel: 9.8.0

CPU: 1.6 ghz
Memory: 2gb

Liked it? Take a second to support Brian Dunaway on Patreon!

3 thoughts on “MacBook Air Keyboard Problem

  1. dee says:

    did you solve your problem.
    it sounds similar to mine.
    i’ve resetted everthing as discribed.
    but nothing solves the problem.

    1. Brian Dunaway says:

      I did fix the problem. Sorry for the belated reply.

      It appears the US language files were gone. I logged into single user-mode (hold down CMD-S during bootup.) Then I run the disk check and mount command (These are right about the command prompt in single user mode.) Then I moved the /var/db/.AppleSetupDone file to /var/db/.AppleSetupDone.old. Then type exit.

      This will boot the computer as it is the first time. Since my English language pack was gone I had to choose Korean (I believe.) This only allowed me one key on the keyboard…The Z key…good enough. I created a user named “Z” and ran through the setup until I got to the registration part. I hit CMD-D and chose Skip.

      I was then able to log in as Z and installed the US international language pack from a USB drive using mouse clicks. I then chose it as my International language default. From there I was able to secure the core US language pack from my other Mac and I was done.

      Woot.

Leave a Reply