Mouse Disappears on Sony VAIO Notebook

[MarkTwain]

The Win 98 (SE) OS on my friend's Sony VAIO F-430 notebook (Pentium III) has lost its mouse! During bootup, he gets an error message saying:

“Invalid VxDynamic link call from PELMOUSE (02) + 000010C to device “000C,” service 3 – Configuration is invalid.” The mouse icon never appears.

How do we restore the mouse? We have the Win 98 Install CDROM, but can't restore
the mouse driver from there—can't find the keystrokes to do it.

I also assume the mouse can be restored via the Control Panel/Device Manager—but that also requires a mouse, and keystrokes that I don't know about...

How can I restore the mouse in this situation?

Thanks in advance for any suggestions....

[pam123]

If you can navigate to Device Manager using the keyboard, pg Up/Down, space bar, and "Enter" you could delete the mouse/trackpad(?) in Device Manager and force Widows to re-recognize it correctly.

Try reading through this first : http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2754...d=1139&sid=460
as it's a more thorough explanation of what you need to do.

edit : If you have an older ps2 mouse around try connecting that for troubleshooting also (there should be a port for it at the back of the notebook) since that notebook is old enough that the problem could be hardware.

[MarkTwain]

Thanks, Pam123--I'll try out your solution.

And thanks for that link--looks useful.