Problem Initializing Keyboard in XP Pro

[SomeoneWeird]

I brought my desktop up to a friend's cabin for use at night while I am here. His old one (which I'm on right now) is a Pentium III, so you can imagine why I'd rather use mine. Anyway, to get to the point, he has a ps/2 mouse and a usb keyboard. When I plug them into their respective ports on the side of my desktop and turn it on, the mouse initializes, but the keyboard fails to do so. As such, I cannot type in the password to get to the desktop. I'm not sure whether the keyboard drivers should install themselves even before getting to the desktop, but when I installed XP Pro, I had a hitch and driver.cab wouldn't install for one reason or another (yes, the disk is legitimate, nothing wrong with the RAM, I ran Windows Memory Diagnostic and Memtest86). Anyway, that hasn't caused me troubles up to this point (for all of my components, I used the driver CD that came with the motherboard), but perhaps it is the reason now.

So, I suppose what I'm asking is if there is any way to get past entering the password so I can get to the desktop and subsequently install keyboard drivers? Thanks in advance for the help!

 

[Harvey]

Win XP has built in USB drivers, but the P3 machine is old enough that the BIOS may not have native code to recognize a USB keyboard before it enters Windows. Some older machines won't recogize either a USB keyboard or mouse, and some will recognize neither.

It may also be as simple as borrowing a PS2 keyboard long enough to check the CMOS to see if there is a setting to recognize "legacy" USB devices when booting to a DOS command prompt. Some allow separate selections for keyboard and mouse.

Hope that helps.

 

[Billb2]

Enable "Legacy USB Support" in your BIOS.
But, you will probably have to use a ps2 keyboard to do that...kind of a catch 22..........

 

[SomeoneWeird]

I was a slight ambiguous, I think. I'm using his keyboard/mouse with my desktop. I guess it's a driver issue since driver.cab (the cabinet of all XP drivers) did not install properly during XP setup. I tried enabling Legacy USB Support, and it was already enabled, anyway. In a proper situation, having that enabled would prompt XP to provide USB keyboard drivers, I suppose.

So, there is absolutely no way around typing in the password (or typing in anything, for that matter) to access the desktop? Too bad I can't pull up some kind of virtual keyboard right at that screen.

 

[Harvey]

Did you try clearing the CMOS, either with the jumper or by removing the battery?