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Wednesday, June 20, 2012

grub2 usb keyboard not working

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.

4 comments:

Unknown said...

Hi there I'm running into a similar issue where my K60 made by corsair is not working while in grub and when i do a yum install grub2-efi it installs it, but I cant use the grub2-efi commands like you use in your post... any advice?

Jamie said...

If you do an "rpm -ql grub2-efi" which will list all the files that package contains.

You could also try a "yum provides \*grub2-efi-install" which will find the package that file is in.

I should also probably note, the above didn't turn out to be a perfect solution for me. I sometimes need to hit the reset button a few times before the keyboard works in GRUB.

Unknown said...

Have you seen any modules that would allow touch sensitivity to grub or mouse control?

Jamie said...

I haven't sorry, I'm not sure there is such a thing.