It's clearer now. One of my laptops (XP for good reasons, though it came with WIN8/64) shows something like you seem to describe. It gives a 6 lines menu (system info, diagnostics, boot device options, setup, recovery, Enter for continue startup). The firmware (UEFI) was coded by 'Insyde Software' and it's entirely keyboard based. My Win7 box is a desktop, a type mostly found in managed corporate environments. That has a more elaborate UEFI menu and surprisingly, also can use the mouse. That's because Lenovo implemented a mouse driver in firmware. Windows deserves criticism and worse but it's the wrong tree. The OS (Win, Linux, whatever) has got nothing to do with it. It only will begin to load when the firmware finished it's tasks and execution was passed to the boot partition. For the same reason, the observation that Win 7 does not handle the mouse for advanced setup is off the track and cannot help with the original issue. The only way would be to understand and modify (in a word, crack) the firmware code and re-flash the chips. That was not easy for BIOS and it's quite difficult and risky (bricking the mobo) for UEFI.Homer wrote: ↑Sun Jul 22, 2018 7:21 pm My 2 UEFI machines displayed 4 messages, including the one to display the boot menu
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I've always found that going into the BIOS/UEFI Setup, then navigate to the Exit menu selection using the left or right arrows, then exit without saving gives me both mouse and keyboard at the windows logon screen.
The Win logon screen comes late in the startup sequence. By then Win should make the keyboard and mouse available, of course. The only issue is that Win 7 came earlier than USB 3, so to use (~waste) such ports, legacy hardware support must be enabled in BIOS/EFI/UEFI. Once, and then left alone. For an alternative way, I slipstreamed the required drivers (plus other stuff while cut garbage) into a few different Win setup files, to make tailored installations on USB 3 sticks and drives and no need to get into any BIOS. But that would be a different topic.