Apple A1243 Keyboard Not Recognized by rEFInd

[Rob Jenson]

Installed rEFInd 0.8.3 onto a Core Duo Mac mini (Early 1996) with an Apple A1243 (silver keyboard, white keys, separate scrolling and numeric keypad keys) USB keyboard. rEFInd did not recognize the left and right arrow keys with which to select my boot media or the info page. I plugged in a generic Dell keyboard and the arrow keys work fine.

Running on:
EFI Revision 1.10
Platform: x86 (32 bit)
Firmware: Apple 8192.01
Screen Output: UGA Draw (EFI 1.10), 1920x1080

_rob_

[Roderick W. Smith]

I've got a debugging version of rEFInd for you to try:

www.rodsbooks.com/refind_x64_0.8.3.4.efi

To use it, do the following:

1. Download the file.
2. Copy your current rEFInd installation, including its support files, to another directory. For instance, if rEFInd is in EFI/refind on your main partition, copy it to EFI/refind_test, leaving the original intact.
3. Replace the refind_x64.efi file in the copied directory with the refind_x64_0.8.3.4.efi test file. (If refind_x64.efi is called something else, delete it.) The point is to have just one .efi file in the new test directory, simply to avoid confusion.
4. Edit the refind.conf file in the test directory and uncomment the textonly line.
5. Plug in both the non-working and working keyboards.
6. Reboot.
7. In the rEFInd that comes up (which should be your original one), test that the working keyboard still works and that the non-working one still doesn't. If you see something else, report back.
8. Using the working keyboard, select the rEFInd icon in the EFI/refind_test directory. When it comes up, it should be in text mode (no GUI).
9. Try to use the non-working keyboard. You should see messages along the lines of "Scan code: 0x10" appear. (This won't be pretty; the messages will appear on the highlighted line, so formatting will suffer.) Note what the scan codes are for the non-working keys and report them to me. Be sure to note which keys produce which scan codes. Also, please be sure to try all four arrow keys. (It's not clear from your problem report if the up and down arrow keys work.)

With the information you report, I should be able to fix the program, unless there's some further complication (like if the keyboard isn't reporting scan codes, or if it's the same one for all the non-working keys).

[Rob Jenson]

Hi Rod,

This kinda fell by the wayside last month. I tried 0.8.4 today and I still have the keyboard problem. Can you send me a link for a debugging version of 0.8.4 and I'll get you the data for fixing this keyboard problem?

Thanks.

_rob_