USB Keyboard not working at boot (between GRUB and disk decryption)

Posted on Sun 18 December 2016 in tech

On my thinkpad I have an encrypted Arch installation setup similarly to my chromebook setup. Since I bought my a new wireless usb keyboard this thing never worked for decrypting the system. It perfectly works once Arch has started up, but for entering the password at boot I had to use the notebook keyboard.

Add missing modules to initramsfs

Turns out my initramfs was missing the necessary modules.

  • Checkout the Arch wiki
  • Find the relevant keyboard modules. In my case it was hid_generic and usbhid
  • Edit /etc/mkinitcpio.conf and set MODULES="hid_generic usbhid" (or whatever your modules are)
  • mkinitcpio -p linux
  • Reboot

arch linux