I hold down shift key after BIOS beep in Mint16Mate yet no recovery menu.
BiostarTA75M A4-3400 8gb ram. Using either ps2 HP or Logitech k360 wireless keyboard.
sister machine with Gigabyte A55M DS2 A4-3300 8gb ram running Mint14Mate
is able to run recovery using same method. Using either ps2 HP or Logitech K360 wireless keyboard.
Seems like Biostar doesn't recognize Logitec without an OS. PS2 use to work to get recovery menu. Or is it Logitec's fault? Any ideas how to recover Mint16Mate machine?

where does it boot to without holding shift?
maybe you can get into recovery mode (basically a root terminal) from there?

It boots to the default Mate desktop, just bypassing the recovery menu. You don't suppose just holding the shift key on Mint 16 automatically runs recovery files during boot without showing it on the monitor cuz my system seems to have straightened out. Although I had reselected Mate as the default desktop and couldn't be certain if recovery or reselecting Mate as default was what brought both machines back to a better state.
I briefly searched the net for ways to run recovery on mint16mate and nothing was found. thanx

recovery menu... i guess it's GRUB you're talking about?
you can adjust GRUB so that the menu comes up at every boot for, say, 5 seconds, then it boots normally if you don't press any buttons.
that would be the first step to find out whether it's really your mouse/keyboard that's not recognized during early boot. i had that myself some time ago, but there's not many things that you can't fix later on after booting up.

fyi, "recovery mode" is usually one of the options you get in the GRUB menu.

Can that grub adjusment be done by checking a box in synaptic or something else in menus? Otherwise I'm clueless here. Learning and doing is part of my dementia. Could take me years to figure out but by that time the version has gone obsolete. I read the links in your reply and wasn't able to gleen how to get her done. Those links seemed to talk about and around it as if I alread knew how to do it. I do remember some Ubuntu versions log ago came with that enabled. Dirty shame we can't quickly select what we liked in all versions and incorporate them in one without having to become a computer scientist. Thanx again

open a terminal then have these lines to be this:
then

Would having both grub-commom 2.00-19 and grub2 common 2.00-19 files installed at same time be causing any of this grub issue of not being able to see grub menu on boot after holding down shift key??
I tried to get a screenshot of this in Synaptic but couldn't find where it put it!

?????

anyhow, do what colorpurple said.

apart from that, synaptic is only for installing software (not making screenshots and other day-to-day activities).
you most probably won't need synaptic to solve this.

I thought I mentioned this before/earlier but I cannot find it in the thread history. Several boots past, I reselected the Mate desktop as my defaulf desktop to boot to and the boot issue resolved after that. It has booted to Mate ever since maybe 10 boots no hiccoughs. what could have caused it to not boot to Mate when Mate was selected to be the desktop of choice during installation? Since it is booting ok now is it still wise to do what color purple said to do?

If it is booting the way you want it, then leave it as is.

I tried something different during boot time before last and got the grub menu. suprise suprise suprise
In previous versions to Mint16Mate I always held down the shift key after BIOS post/beep and was able to do recovery from the menu.
Mint 16 Mate wasn't letting me do it that way. I tried holding down shift key before the BIOS Post/beep and was able to use the grub menu. Anyone know if it is suppose to be this way?

I've been doing a little bit of investigation and found out that if you want to see the grub menu instead of being hidden will also have to edit /etc/grub.d/30_osprober to change the last line from this to this then rerun