F8 Key not working when installing Windows XP

[HipHoppity]

Just a general addition to this discussion that may help those with Mac OSX Hosts =>

Your F8 key might be designated as your Spaces shortcut. If so, that would explain why you're running into trouble during the WinXP installation. To check this go to System Preferences => Exposé & Spaces and look under "To activate Spaces:". If the F8 key is listed as your shortcut change it to F7 or something else that will not interfere with your Windows installation.

[rpmurray]

Your F8 key might be designated as your Spaces shortcut.

I don't think this would matter. When the guest has the focus, all keyboard input is routed to the guest, even the function keys.

[pablomagnifico]

I had this problem. Using a Microsoft keyboard in SnowLeopard OSX. The f8 in the "key board viewer" that is now available worked. It doesn't have the "Fn" key so most of the help here was useless to me. I don't know what the heck is wrong with my keyboard, but this is a nice convenient work around. If you don't have an icon in the upper right of the menu bar you can turn it on in the keyboard system preferences window.

I hope this gets indexed by google and other people can benefit from my luck in finding that out.

[bmcgonag]

I had this problem, and it about drove me nuts. Even though I made the keyboard active in the guest OS, I finally had to go into System Preferences in OS X Snow Leopard, and under Keyboard and Mouse check the box that says use function keys as standard function keys. This disables their special features, of which mine was to start iTunes every time I pressed F8.

Hope it helps someone,

Brian

[TheMadTurtle]

Actually, just press 'fn' and F8 and that should work. It worked for me, anyway.

[Sasquatch]

That's the problem with Apples. They don't default to function keys, but multimedia instead. Similar to keyboards that have an F-lock key, without the F-lock enabled, you use multimedia as default, not the actual function keys. Quite annoying when you're playing games that use those keys.

[foodydude]

Same thing was happening for me when using a USB mac keyboard plugged into my laptop...when I tried the built in keyboard F8 key it worked though. Thanks for the posts.

[macmanitou]

Hi guys,

that should not be a problem on any post-10.4 Mac. Just go to the system preferences and check the option "Use all F1,F2, ... as standard key functions". Default for this setting is unchecked, so that you can use the media keys. If you enable it you can use the function keys without interception by the apple applications and if you want to access them just use "Fn".

Best regards,
Sascha

[stoni23]

Hey guys,

I have this problem, but with a new twist. I don't have a mac keyboard. I'm using a PC keyboard because my original mac keyboard jumped into a glass of water and got fried. Anyhow, there are f1-f12 keys on this keyboard, but the system does not recognize them. There is no function key either. Also, if i go into keyboard settings there is no option for f1-f12 to make them standard as the macintosh doesn't even recognize the function keys to begin with.

Anybody got any ideas?

[stoni23]

Figured it out... I installed a program that remaps the keyboard keys and changed my back quote key to f8. So all i had to do was hit the back quote key and it works.

[tallship]

I don't know if this is similar to a problem I had but.. In order to get the focus on the keyboard I had to press the tab key first and then pressed the function key(s) I needed.

Thank you @smurfcorpse - this helped me and solved my issue, which although wasn't XP, nevertheless allowed me to finish an install. here's the particulars, in the event that updating this old thread holds relevance for people other than myself who were driving to this particular thread by a Google search result:

The particular problem for me was in installing the Solaris 11.3 applicance (sol-11_3-vbox.ova) on a Win 10/64 host in VirtualBox.

Once I hit the tab key a couple of times I was able to combine Fn+F2 to affect the "Next" action during the Solaris installation.

I hope that helps someone else, and the age of this thread was really irrelevant as the content of the thread was indeed STILL RELEVANT in solving my issue (even considering that it wasn't a WinXP OS).

[tron70]

I will say that I am glad the Internet doesn't self-erase...this helped my son install Win2000 on VB in Win10
(rightshift+ctrl) then (fn+F8) and it went to the next step for installation....