REfind, Bluetooth and Apple Recovery
An EFI boot manager utility
Status: Beta
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I am running MacOS Mojave and the latest Refind version. For whatever reason, when Refind handles booting of the recovery partition, the bluetooth magic mouse and keyboard don't work. However when booting to recovery using the command + r, they do. This didn't happen in High Sierra and Refind 10.x prior to APFS. Any ideas what is happening or how to fix it? Thanks.
Last edit: David P. 2018-11-13
It sounds like the Recovery environment isn't fully initializing its Bluetooth devices, whereas the full boot is. This may work when the EFI boots straight through, but rEFInd requires user interaction, which may leave things in a subtly altered state. (To be sure, rEFInd doesn't explicitly do anything Bluetooth-related; but rEFInd does use standard EFI calls to read the keyboard, and that may be causing the EFI to initialize Bluetooth devices.)
Similar problems sometimes occur with video devices, and I've tried to find ways to restore the devices to a "pristine" state to work around these problems, but with no luck so far.
Overall, I suggest you report this as a bug to Apple. Clearly, macOS can do a proper job of it, but the Recovery environment isn't doing so for some reason. It's also possible that somebody on a Mac forum will be able to suggest a configuration change or other workaround.