Hey guys.
I'm trying to put Trisquel on an 5-year-old Alienware Area51 M9750.
I have two problems:
#1) It will not boot from a CD or USB stick without manually selecting it
using F11 during the BIOS. It will only boot from a hard drive.
#2) I cannot manually select to boot from CD/USB because the keyboard is not
working during the BIOS. The laptop keyboard works after an OS has been
loaded from the HDD, but not during the startup. A USB keyboard also doesn't
work during the BIOS process. No surprise there. I also cannot use a PS/2
keyboard because there is no connection for such.
Is this a dead CMOS battery? I used to have this set to boot from CD first
before the HDD. If this is a dead CMOS battery, then booting from the HDD
might just be the fallback default CMOS options set at the factory.
At any rate, I still don't understand why the keyboard doesn't work during
the BIOS until the OS is loaded.
Any advice would be appreciated. Thank you.
