I know this thread has been going on for months now, but I felt like contributing to this issue since I suffered the same faith on my home computer.
What I did (and this worked for me) is change the power settings on my USB device drivers in device manager.
Just go to device manager - Universal serial bus controllers and go to the properties of one of your "Generic USB Hub" devices.
You should have a tab called "Power Management", make sure both checkboxes are UNchecked.
This needs to be done for all USB controllers. Thank God MS provided us with Power Options in Control Panel.
Go to Control Panel - Power Options and choose "Change Plan Settings" on the plan you are currently using. Next, click the change advanced power settings link and make your way to "USB Settings" in the Advanced Settings screen.
Drop down to "USB Selective suspend setting"and make sure to DISABLE all in there.
This will automatically uncheck all checkboxes in Power Management of ALL your USB controllers.
Let me explain what this actually does.
When a USB controller receives an error from the OS, it normally shuts down. This is what is happening on Windows 8 boot. Windows somehow detects an error on the USB controllers where your mouse and keyboard are located and the ports just shut themselves.
Disabling this feature like done above, makes sure the ports keep passing info to the system and hopefully keep your mouse and keyboard alive during boot :)
Hope this helped, if it did please let me know so I can feed my ego ;-)
Cheers,
Tom