• We’re currently investigating an issue related to the forum theme and styling that is impacting page layout and visual formatting. The problem has been identified, and we are actively working on a resolution. There is no impact to user data or functionality, this is strictly a front-end display issue. We’ll post an update once the fix has been deployed. Thanks for your patience while we get this sorted.

Problem Initializing Keyboard in XP Pro

S

SomeoneWeird

Junior Member
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!
 
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. 🙂
 
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..........
 
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.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

TRENDING THREADS

Back
Top