keyboard woes with an encrypted disk

During today’s installfest we had a system with keyboard issues. The specific details were this: An ASUS laptop E200H, ubuntu 17.04 with gnome, and an encrypted hard drive. The system booted up to the screen where it requests the disk encryption password. At this point in time, the system did not allow the use of the laptop’s keyboard. It did however recognize an external USB keyboard.

The critical information was found on this page: https://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?t=211313

We theorized that a driver needed for the laptop keyboard is on the encrypted drive and therefore not yet available when the password was needed.

using lsmod showed more than 100 modules loaded. Which ones were needed for the keyboard wasn’t clear (simply using those ones that mention “hid” was not successful). We simply added all modules shown by lsmod to the /etc/initramfs-tools/modules file and re-created the initramfs.
On next boot the keyboard was operational and usable for entering the disk password.

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