I installed the newly released Fedora 17 this week, only to find I could no longer control the GRUB2 screen to get into Windows to play some games. The keyboard and mouse work perfectly in BIOS, and in Linux once USB drivers are loaded, just not at the GRUB2 screen.
Many forum threads exist for this, most pointing towards the "USB Legacy" or similar option in the BIOS. I had this turned on, however turning it off made no difference either.
GRUB2 can load some driver modules, so perhaps it wasn't loading the USB modules. Adding GRUB_PRELOAD_MODULES="usb usb_keyboard ehci ohci uhci" to /etc/default/grub and then rebuilding the config files with grub2-mkconfig -o /boot/grub2/grub.cfg didn't change anything either.
At this point I started coming across articles mentioning UEFI support for GRUB2. UEFI is the "new BIOS" standard coming out on new motherboards. My motherboard is a fairly new model, so it does have EFI firmware.
Turns out the solution is to install a version of GRUB2 with EFI support. This was done with yum install grub2-efi to install the package, then grub2-efi-install /dev/sda to install the EFI-supporting bootloader onto my hard drive. I regenerated a new config with grub2-efi-mkconfig -o /boot/grub2/grub.cfg while I was at it.
Now my USB keyboard works perfectly in GRUB2.
