After migrating to a physical Windows 8 image to VMware Workstation, the keyboard was not working. I did have a mouse and the on screen keyboard to work through things. There were several posts that were available with suggestions, but these are the steps that worked for me.
The source machine was a standard load of a Lenovo w550s. It had been way too long without Linux for me and it was time to make the switch. After about 25 minutes and 40GB later, the image was onto my storage appliance. The issue however was after the start up of Windows 8 – there was no keyboard. I tested accessing the pre-boot options and they keyboard worked fine there. It was clearly something with the legacy hardware, drivers, or configuration that was hanging the system up after Windows loaded. VMware’s KB articles had several suggestions, which most had proven not valid for me.
Ultimately, a simple registry edit proved to be successful. Under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Class\{4D36E96B-E325-11CE-BFC1-08002BE10318}, the UpperFilters needs to ONLY have kbdclass. In my case, I removed the Synoptics reference. If you delete the kbdclass as well, the keyboard will still fail to work.
If you happen to have mouse issues, the relevant class is {4D36E96F-E325-11CE-BFC1-08002BE10318}.
While VMware communities provided the source there were several KB articles that proved irrelevant to my situation.
Thanks a lot for publishing a fix/solution. Your registry solution worked for me.
J.
Thx for this great help
regards Greg
Thank you very much!
I had the very same problem, and I spent almost a week working on every possible solution
Your solution finally worked!
I think that Vmware should fix this issue, since it is a common problem!
Best regards
Ambrogio
Greetings from Sunny South Africa. Dude, you are a legend! This explaination with the screenshot is concise and to the point. Solution worked for my Lenovo Ideapad Z580.
Great job and way to go. I do not know how you found this needle in the haystack but what a great post. I tried everything to get the keyboard to work (different drivers, different versions of VMware tools, the VMware keyboard kb article, etc.) and I could not get nothing to work. Your registry setting resolved my issue.
If you do not mind, I am going to post your link on the Lenovo, ubuntu and VMware blog sites. There are many people experiencing the same issue and posted on those sites.
Worked a treat, really saved me a lot of time.