keyboard does not work in kernel space

[Sebastiaan van Erk]

Hi all!

I just got a new Inspiron 9400 laptop and was trying to do full disk 
encryption with GEOM ELI. Everything seems to be working fine now, 
except that the keyboard does not seem to work in kernel space so that 
when my USB boot stick asks me for the passphrase of my internal hard 
drive, I cannot enter anything. I know this is not specific to GEOM ELI, 
since I was messing around with my USB pendrive and forgot to specify a 
root device, which the kernel prompted me for the root device and I had 
exactly the same problem: the keyboard did not work.

When I change the root device to my pen drive it boots to the login 
prompt (user space), and the keyboard works fine at that moment.

Is this problem familiar to anybody? Is there any way to solve it?

Thanks in advance,
Sebastiaan