MDV 2008.1 Keyboard dead after install

[Guest persistability]

I just installed Mandriva 2008 Spring on a Dell Inspiron 4100 laptop. This laptop has had Mandriva on it for the last 8 years so should not be unknown territory. Installation went fine (except a big pause at "Preparing bootloader" ... before it continued ok). Rebooted. Started up using the graphical boot sequence, and came to the KDE login page. All users were shown on the login and I selected one (with the USB mouse). Tried to type the password and NOTHING. No keys do anything. Tried tabbing around. NOTHING. Tried Ctrl+Alt+Del NOTHING. Tried rebooting into "Safe" mode. No keyboard there either. There was keyboard during the install process so some Mandriva kernel knows how to access the inbuilt keyboard (its a laptop after all so a keyboard isn't optional!).

 

I'm guessing its not an X config issue since also has no keyboard at console login (Safe mode), so is kernel/driver maybe ?

 

Most recent version of Mandriva working on this hardware was 2006.

 

I can get in via "Rescue" and mount partitions and update them ... but what to try ? Any ideas????

 

 

Thanks in advance

[Guest persistability]

Some more info, after going into "rescue". Pages of warnings in /var/log/kernel/warning.log

 

psmouse.c: TouchPad at iso0060/serio1/input0 lost sync at byte 1

 

atkbd.c: Unknown key pressed (translated set 2, code 0x0 on isa0060/serio0).

atkbd.c: Use 'setkeycodes 00 <keycode>' to make it known

[many more of these]

 

 

and in /var/log/messages

input: AT Translated Set 2 keyboard as /class/input/input0

serio: Synaptics pass-through port at isa0060/serio1/input0

input: SynPS/2 Synaptics TouchPad as /class/input/input1

 

Is this the right keyboard for this laptop? I don't have my MDK 2006 partition now to compare against.

 

Any input at all ?