Trying to recover a root password in an old FreeBSD box (that has been working flawlessly for many years), after selecting single user boot in Beastie menu the keyboard stop responding…. oh well the USB support in old versions is somewhat buggy… just before i was going into the LiveCD route i found a thread in FreeBSD lists with this info:
1) From Beastie menu, escape to loader prompt.
2) set hint.atkbd.0.flags=”0x1″
3) boot -s
and it did the work. Afterward it was a child’s game to change the root password. All the credits to the freebsd lists.