I'm doing freelance work at home. The company gave me the cpu with the info I need to do my work. When I boot up and it gets to the windows welcome screen, where you hit ctrl-alt-delete to put your password in, the keyboard and mouse don't work. The keyboard works when I hit F2 to get to setup screen when I first boot up, but not on welcome screen. The computer has Windows XP Professional. Any suggestions.
Keyboard & mouse stop working at welcome screen
- Thread starter jgblfans
- Start date
gbhall
Posts: 2,419 +77
Yes, Windows driver or hardware problem. Often caused by USB drivers or other attached USB devices.
XP ? Could be ten years old then......more than a little unreasonable of your client to expect you to do important work on obsolete equipment. Unless there is a reason for that, like you are working on equally old or older software that is now incompatible with Win 7. Tough if that is true.
XP ? Could be ten years old then......more than a little unreasonable of your client to expect you to do important work on obsolete equipment. Unless there is a reason for that, like you are working on equally old or older software that is now incompatible with Win 7. Tough if that is true.
gbhall
Posts: 2,419 +77
Ignore me if I am reading you wrongly, but something tells me the job you are doing is to recover information from an old XP PC. probably because the PC does not boot any more !!
If I am right, why not start with that poser, because there are much, much better and quicker ways of doing it than trying to get the PC running again.
(a) mount the HDD in another PC and read it directly
(b) burn puppy linux to a CD, boot off it and read the HDD onto a USB drive
(c) burn UBCD4Win to CD, boot it and proceed as (b) but with optional ability to debug the old PC in addition.
If I am right, why not start with that poser, because there are much, much better and quicker ways of doing it than trying to get the PC running again.
(a) mount the HDD in another PC and read it directly
(b) burn puppy linux to a CD, boot off it and read the HDD onto a USB drive
(c) burn UBCD4Win to CD, boot it and proceed as (b) but with optional ability to debug the old PC in addition.
gbhall
Posts: 2,419 +77
My thought too.OP refers to the tower as a 'CPU'. I'd be scared if someone got OP to 'recover data' ...
Sorry I called it a cpu...no I was not hired to recover data. The computer was working at their office. They just decided to give it to me to work off of because they didn't want to copy the info I needed to a flash drive and possibly forget something. The guy had it in his trunk for 2 weeks before he gave it to me. I posted here for help, not to be disrespected St1ckM4n.
gbhall
Posts: 2,419 +77
So, you are in a bind. Hard for you to go back to them and say - your PC doesn't work. Even though that is true, it makes you appear a tiny bit less capable than they might hope.
Two suggestions - as I already mentioned, booting a CD of a portable Linux will get you into the PC so you can extract what you need to a USB stick and hence onto your own PC to work on as needed. This won't help if it turns out there is software required to work on it, which you don't have, or it will not install or will not run on Win7/8 whatever you have personally. At least, if you do have to go back and say 'this PC has been all shook up and never started for me, give me another'....then you have shown competence in getting well past that first obstacle.
So far, you have not told us much about the PC apart from it runs XP pro - is it a box or a portable? Have you tried another keyboard and mouse as suggested? Furthermore, since this PC is probably quite old and has had no power for quite a while, I would not be at all surprised if the CMOS battery was failing to keep the PC bios correct, and that will very, very often lead to a non-booting situation. I could even demonstrate that with an older PC of mine. Unfortunately in that situation you do need a certain familiarity with what settings the bios might require, but at least, the date and time, the right HDD at the top of the boot order, the right drive channel for that drive, settings for keyboard/mouse/usb are all possible things to check.
Two suggestions - as I already mentioned, booting a CD of a portable Linux will get you into the PC so you can extract what you need to a USB stick and hence onto your own PC to work on as needed. This won't help if it turns out there is software required to work on it, which you don't have, or it will not install or will not run on Win7/8 whatever you have personally. At least, if you do have to go back and say 'this PC has been all shook up and never started for me, give me another'....then you have shown competence in getting well past that first obstacle.
So far, you have not told us much about the PC apart from it runs XP pro - is it a box or a portable? Have you tried another keyboard and mouse as suggested? Furthermore, since this PC is probably quite old and has had no power for quite a while, I would not be at all surprised if the CMOS battery was failing to keep the PC bios correct, and that will very, very often lead to a non-booting situation. I could even demonstrate that with an older PC of mine. Unfortunately in that situation you do need a certain familiarity with what settings the bios might require, but at least, the date and time, the right HDD at the top of the boot order, the right drive channel for that drive, settings for keyboard/mouse/usb are all possible things to check.
St1ckM4n
Posts: 2,887 +628
My sincere apologies if you were offended, I definitely didn't mean it that way.
Other suggestions for you: try multiple mice/keyboards, see if any of the lights go off on them upon welcome screen. Are they USB, or the round PS/2 plug?
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