Mouse/Touchpad not working in Mac OS X Lion Pre-Boot Authentication (PBA) with File Vault 2

Question

I set up File Vault 2 in Mac OS X Lion with Pre-Boot Authentication (PBA). In PBA-login my USB-keyboard is working, while using a wrong keyboard layout. I can neither use my magic touchpad nor an USB-mouse in PBA. Thus I can't change the keyboard layout located in the upper right corner. I tried unplugging all USB-devices except keyboard and mouse. Nothing seems to help and the mouse cursor isn't moving.

How can I get magic trackpad or USB-mouse to work in PBA login screen or manually set the used keyboard layout in PBA?

Update: Still no (USB-)mouse or bluetooth trackpad support in File Vault 2 Login Screen. Today I talked to Apple Support for over one hour with no result. Every idea is appreciated.

Answer 1

I'm having the same issue and currently I found two workarounds:

Workaround 1 - turn off/on the mouse

• turn off the mouse (tiny on/off switch on the bottom of the mouse, put it in lower position)
• turn it on - small green led indicator should start to blink -> searching for bluetooth connection
• wait for a minute until the indicator turns steady (green light)
• check if mouse works
• if this doesn't work then repeat the process once more - i.e. turn off, wait until light becomes steady

My assumption is that there is some problem with bluetooth initialization in OSX in PBA mode and this procedure resets something.

Workaround 2 - reconfigure EFI login to display login as name/password

Setup:

• system preferences / users&groups / login options / display login window as "name and password"

• delete some EFI login cached files like described here https://derflounder.wordpress.com/2013/06/19/enabling-filevault-2-pre-boot-login -screen-functions-from-the-command-line/ -

in addition to running the defaults commands, you also need to remove certain cache filenames ending in .efires from /System/Library/Caches/com.apple.corestorage/EFILoginLocalizations. Clearing the filename.efires cache files forces the system to update the FileVault 2 pre-boot login screen.

• i.e. do this (or move to some backup location) - rm /System/Library/Caches/com.apple.corestorage/EFILoginLocalizations/*.efires

• shutdown the computer

• start the computer -> you should get login window as "[username]/password" - where you don't need mouse but keyboard is enough

Additional note:

In console you may check login properties like this:

defaults read /Library/Preferences/com.apple.loginwindow

or you may change any of them - with

default write ...