Grub 2.02 beta - usb keyboard odd behavior and freeze problem
 

Hello,

I am having a keyboard problem on the grub menu screen. My system is a dual-boot system with Windows 7 and Debian Jessie (which I installed recently). When the grub menu appears, I can move the highlight between the menu options, but when I hit Enter, it does nothing. If I hit any key after that, it starts loading the OS I chose. Also, if I stay on the menu screen too long, it freezes completely and I have to reset the system.

I am using USB keyboard and it works fine in BIOS/OS.
I have "Legacy USB Support" and "XHCI Hand-off" enabled in BIOS.

I tried loading the usb and usb_keyboard modules using isnmod and GRUB_PRELOAD_MODULES, but neither worked.

Could anyone tell me if there is anything I can do to fix this problem?

Thank you.

Sound like some EFI vs. MBR issue to me...
 

On that new laptop I bought recently, you can only either have legacy boot mode or EFI. So installing Linux in MBR (legacy) mode didn't work with similar symptoms. (No grub showing because of EFI mode or Windows being unbootable because of legacy mode.)
Had to get my install media saved on that USB drive in EFI and then install in EFI mode (BIOS setting) and then finally (after telling it to install on the hard drive manually) it worked (all EFI).

I found out about how the the EFI/legacy mode works by searching something else on the net. Seems like some hardware producers use some cheap BIOS EFI setting that can only do one mode at a time, while others do a full implementation that can do either only EFI (in EFI mode) or EFI and MBR at the same time (in legacy support mode).

That's my first thought without having any more details (and not knowing how to get them). Might just as well be wrong.

Hi Ratamahatta,

Thank you for your reply.
I am using Legacy BIOS mode for both Windows and Debian. Windows uses MBR and Debian uses GPT.

I tried using older GRUB version to see if it works better, but it was worse than the current version I am using.
Also, I disconnected hard drive that Windows is on and booted the machine, but it made no differences.

I have another machine that uses Legacy BIOS and GPT combination and it works perfectly, so maybe it is the hardware that is causing the problem, like you said. I also read that Intel skylake architecture dropped the support for USB 2.0, so it may be related to that as well.

In any case, I can still manage to boot from Windows when I need to, so I will just live with it until I can find a better solution..

Solved
 

Hello,

I just found a solution.
My system uses ASUS motherboard and on their support page, they say to disable USB emulation if the keyboard does not work in GRUB.

I checked BIOS on my machine and found "USB Keyboard and Mouse Simulator" enabled. I disabled it and now keyboard works perfectly in GRUB menu