No Mouse will be recognized

[Wildnites]

The PC will not recognize or "see" any kind of attached mouse when booting up. Keyboards are recognized fine. This is a previously OK system (Win98 Pentium III ASUS mobo). One day when booting, received message "no mouse recognized" and stopped at BIOS screen. swapped ps/2 ports with keyboard, keyboard ok, mouse still not seen. Tried USB mouse, mouse still not seen. All ports and USBs are enabled in BIOS. keyboard service works fine in BIOS. Never saw a problem like this before. Keyboards work fine in both USB and ps/2, Mice (tried 3 different brands/types) will NOT be recognized whether ps/2 or USB, on either USB port and on either ps/2 port. Any Ideas?

[Wildnites]

Update: I have now been able to get the mouse "seen" and functional while booting win98 in "safe mode" which makes this appear to be a driver problem, no? How do I go about correcting this problem? Since the mouse (USB) does work in the safe mode, that would about nix the theory that the mouse itself is bad. Since I still can't get it to boot windows in the "normal" mode, I am not able to check for driver conflicts in "device manager". Of course, I can go into device manager while in the safe mode, but since not all drivers are loading in this mode, I don't think I would see a truly clear and complete picture of my peripheral driver allocation. Then again, maybe this is NOT a driver problem. Maybe a virus or worm issue? Any suggestions at this point would be encouraging. Thanks.

[Hi Ho]

The last time I had a problem similar to that was when the keyboard would only work once in a while then it stopped working all together. It was the mother board on my old 233 MHz machine that finally died. It was a good thing though. It prompted me to buy a new computer which I needed badly.

[gbirke]

Have you checked for viruses?

[HNPFL]

Since it is an old operating system it is bound to do something stupid like that. So Back-up all your data and re-install the Operating System. Sometimes it comes down to that.

[thesexytater]

i agree reinstall the op sys

[glc]

Let's look for other solutions besides a reinstall, we prefer that be a last resort.

[Wildnites]

Thanks, all! Since I couldn't completely boot to the win98 desktop, I used the Norton rescue diskette which hinted that there might be a virus running on the computer but couldn't be certain. After painstaking considerations, we opted to reformat and reinstall the O/S on C: partition and everything is fine and up and running. The Norton people said it probably was a virus. Usually, if I recall correctly, you *can* boot into windows without a mouse, you'll get the message that windows did not detect a mouse, but you can still get to your desktop. In this case, we'd get the wallpaper but no icons and that message box alerting of "no mouse detected". At this point everything would just halt with no input ability whatsoever. It seemed the only way out of this one, was a reinstall. It was the first time I've ever encountered anything like this, and I've worked on a few PC's in my days. Anyway thanks for the advice, I hope I can return the favor someday.

[Azgir]

I really hope that a reinstall isnt the only option. The local Friends for Animals asked me if I could fix one of their computers. It is having the same problem.

If I boot in Safe Mode the USB mouse and keyboard work fine. If I try to let Windows start normally I get the Windows Mouse Support window saying that windows did not detect a mouse attached to the computer. Nothing works so the system is basically locked at that point. When I use Step-by-Step the system stops after msmouse.vxd with the same error window.

What would make a mouse driver cause problems? What is the difference between Safe Mode and Normal when it comes to mice?

Please let me know if you can think of something short of a reinstall. I dont mind making that decision on my own machines, but if they belong to someone else I want to know their was no choice.

[glc]

The difference is in safe mode the regular mouse driver doesn't load. If you have ANY mouse software installed, uninstall it.

[Azgir]

Well that is probably the problem here. I can't find a Mouse under Control Panel>Device Manager. The heading Mouse isn't even listed.

Now the real problem. The computer won't boot in Normal mode because no Mouse is present and you can't install hardware in Safe mode. I have attempted to use the Intellimouse installer that I downloaded from Microsoft from Safe mode but it keeps freezing up.

Is it possible to force windows to use the Safe mode mouse drivers while booting in Normal mode? Is there any way that I can install a generic mouse or something that would get a mouse listed in the Device Manager so that I can at least get thru a normal start up and then use the installer? How do you install a piece of hardware from Safe mode when you can't use the Add/Remove Hardware in Control Panel?

I have already tried taking out all of the drivers and having Windows re-detect. It detected and installed almost all of the components, but it finally hung on the first pop up that required a response.

I know that I can just re-install and fix this problem and they will believe me when I say I had no choice, but when I tell them that I really want to believe it myself. This is just too stupid of a problem for there to be no way around it.

[Azgir]

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