Hi, and thanks for yr interest.............
I'm guessing, but in modern BIOS/EUFI, during boot, the BIOS/EUFI provides USB capability to allow use of USB keyboard/mouse; at some point , I guess when the control is passed over to the OS, there is a temporary loss of any USB use, until the OS picks up and provides the interface for USB.
However when I was trying to use Hirens to load mini-xp on an Asus PC I was able to load mini-xp but there was no USB functionality; never experienced this with standard BIOS systems
From your answer, running from a Hirens disk, there will be no EFI partition, which would also be true where the hdd is awol? So does this mean Hirens needs modification to work on EUFI/GPT systems? However thinking...