USB drives/keyboard and mouse not working

RacAtat007

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I downloaded a file that required a system restart and when I restarted my PC the keyboard and mouse weren't working. They both light up when I turn the PC on but once windows opens the lights go out. They both still have power and flash for a second when plugged in but that's it. I can't get into safe mode because I can't use the keyboard. Any ideas? Also sorry for any spelling this is from a phone
 
Solution


NO problem, wasn't digging at you or anything, just trying to get info for a better solution for you.

I'd use the windows original disc and boot to do the same as f8 type menu stuff. It gets you the same thing, just boot your windows cd and get the same options from there...

somebodyspecial

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What file did you install? It would be helpful to know what borked your pc :)

Win7 you should be able to get into it by pressing f8 a bunch of times on PC boot (BEFORE you see the windows screen or you're late). As in right after you see post text come up and go away, no harm punching it early repeatedly. That gets you into advanced boot options where you can choose REPAIR and get to system restore options. XP/vista same thing to get to boot menu (but only 7 includes repair by default). Your keyboard should still be alive to get a F8 key in as it likely isn't going belly up until you get past this and whatever is screwing you starts loading.

You can also use your windows CD/dvd (your windows install disc I mean) to get to repair options. Stick it in and boot from the dvdrom. You should be able to hit a key during post to get to an advanced boot menu in most cases as opposed to directly forcing boot from dvdrom in bios settings (which takes longer and know-how). There are vids on the bios changes if needed on youtube. Once booting from it you'll get a message saying "to boot from cd hit any key" or something like that, do so quickly to boot from disc.

On the System Recovery Options menu, click a tool to open it (system restore if you had it on and have some restore points to go back to). Startup repair might work, but system restore is probably going to work here (whatever works).

Is that enough? Got a system repair disc you created earlier when you had windows running (why doesn't anyone make these immediately after an install?)? You can use that too.

Win8 makes it more difficult since it has a very small window. Just another reason 8/8.1 sucks ;)
http://www.7tutorials.com/5-ways-boot-safe-mode-windows-8-windows-81
Win 8/8.1 help there.
 

RacAtat007

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Edit: I have Win 7

I installed powerISO to create a virtual drive and it required a PC restart. Sorry I couldn't explain this all in the first post but I suck typing on a phone. Even though the keyboard/mouse light up when the PC is powered on they dont respond even to push F8 or anything like that. I didn't create a restore disk because this was my first PC build and have never had any issues like this before, lesson learned though. Any other ideas on how to bypass this?
 

somebodyspecial

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NO problem, wasn't digging at you or anything, just trying to get info for a better solution for you.

I'd use the windows original disc and boot to do the same as f8 type menu stuff. It gets you the same thing, just boot your windows cd and get the same options from there. Yes create a recovery disc next time, but this solution should work assuming you have a windows disc (the same one you used to install windows originally). So likely no harm done here in that respect ;) I have poweriso installed myself for the same thing.

I could give other options but this is the easy way (though I covered most in the previous post per os). What OS are you running? Can't really do more without knowing this, but the windows cd is probably the answer to all OS's.

When booting the disc instead of choosing INSTALL select REPAIR to get to system recover options on the disc like SYSTEM RESTORE which will probably get you back if you didn't turn it off. Other options are there also on that menu once repair is chosen. Choose a restore point before your poweriso install date/time. You must be using win8/8.1 if you can't hit the key in time before the OS borks your keyboard/mouse. It has a boot that is so fast the window of time to get the keys hit is very difficult but NOT impossible if pounding it like a machine gun.

This might make you laugh, but you can try plugging in a 2nd mouse or keyboard and while the first may be dead the 2nd lives...ROFL. You can get your work done maybe then and remove the 2nd after done restoring the system with system restore etc. That's cheating but hey, whatever works...ROFLMAO. I can hear you saying WTF, seriously it can't be that easy can it? LOL. Just try if you can if you have no disc etc. I have all kinds of extras here, but you may not. Fixed with a quick trip to the pc shop locally and $5 bucks or something for a junk tester (that always comes in handy at some point anyway). I keep a ps2, multiple usb's etc on hand but I'm an IT guy so we kind of think like this ;)

That said win8/8.1 needs to die :) Queue win8 lovers blasting me...I digress...

Cmon, tell me you have a 2nd of either or both, and fix it with a 2nd mouse or keyboard (or heck, 2nd on both...LOL) so I can have a good laugh today. I've been up all night and deserve one ;) I'm about to go down probably for a few hours so hopefully you get up with the mouse/keyboard trick or booting your windows disc if you have one (how do you build a pc without a disc or usb image or something?). If there is a PS2 port on pc get one of those instead if you buy one for testing. Sadly most seem to have less issues with ps2 which is stupid for MS. How the heck can you screw up the #1 used connections for keyboard/mouse?

What motherboard?

Hate to ask for sys specs on a phone guy. If you know how to reset cmos (last choice here as a new system builder, just an option but if you built this box you had to set up the bios once before anyway) you can try this which might free up whatever the heck is stuck in windows. If on 8/8.1 please think about switching to avoid all the issue this OS has with many apps, hardware etc. While this seems caused by PowerIso there are a crap-ton of people complaining about usb mouse/keyboard issues repeatedly disappearing in win8. I don't care what anyone says, win7 is better. You might think about installing win7 if you have it. I do it all the time for people that own 8 and hate it and have a legit win7 copy to use. With so much hate for win8/8.1 you may have luck returning it if you just bought it. I saw this with unreal years ago at frys with so many people coming back complaining about DRM (I bought Quake3 for my dad for xmas instead due to this at the time until later once drm worked out) they actually allowed the returns! Holy crap. Once opened you're usually owning it, but not in that case as it had so many problems with certain optical drives (panasonic one etc IIRC). There was a line a mile long at frys as I was buying quake instead...LOL. Just a thought if you can do it.

Hope you fix with 2nd key/mouse or the disc. One way should work, most likely disc fixes all OS versions in multiple ways (sys restore, restore image, repair, etc).

 
Solution

RacAtat007

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I have Windows 7 Home Premium, Biostar TA990FXE Mobo, AMD FX 8350 CPU and Gigabyte HD7950 GPU. So I plugged in a PS2 keyboard and spammed both of them while booting and was able to get into the Bios and boot to safe mode! From there they worked and was able to reinstall drivers. Everything is working now, thanks so much for your help man I was panicking for a little bit. Just posted specs incase anyone else has this problem and is trying to figure it out. Again thanks for your help
 

somebodyspecial

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TOUCHDOWN!...LOL. Glad to see you back up. No need to panic, there are tons of brains in here to help you and many are highly qualified techs in daily jobs doing this stuff :) Very odd with poweriso issue but not shocked. If for some reason that is just cast out now (still OK to use after fixing the drivers?), I've used alcohol 120% (good burning app also) for the same thing and in fact I have both installed, just using poweriso for now which is great for extracting data from the images etc. I have a 1/2 dozen burning apps installed (shocked that doesn't cause some issues...LOL) Each for different jobs (imgburn is best! and free, tons of users/help).

I used to like daemon tools for virtual drives but kept running into issues with the latest ones with other apps or just me plugging/unplugging so many external drives plus a few flash drives (I think it freaked or something, I have well over a dozen), so went to others for this job. Alcohol and poweriso seem equal for this purpose. My dad's PC has alcohol, and likes it also and he's not a total nerd these days so it isn't that hard to use. I've also had experience with slysoft stuff for this which always worked fine too. I used to have to try all kinds of crap to support customers so I use much more apps covering the same stuff than most.

You might want to use Virtual PC (microsoft free tool) for mounting images of your own PC to test crap without worry. Virtualbox is out there too for this, here's both links.
http://www.virtualbox.org
http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=24439
32 or 64bit. Just a thought if you've never went down this road.
http://www.vmware.com/products/player
Also vmware player can be used. All 3 allow you to mount an image of your PC and do dangerous crap in there and if it screws up you just delete the file and copy the original image back to your drive and go again and again...Nice. So you make your system image then copy it to external or something so you can just keep replacing it when you mess up the file on your local drive doing something you don't want to test in your REAL OS. From an SSD they can load fast too. An xp image is small and can be used for all kinds of testing (if you don't have space for a win7, xp, vista, win8 collection xp is perfect for testing crap, vhd (ms), vmdk (vmware image) etc images can be mounted with the 3 tools mentioned). I won't go into how to use these 3 here, as anyone can likely google the tool name and find vids for each on youtube which is easier than typing it all for each. I'm just giving the links here for people who don't realize this stuff exists, you can take it as far as wanted after that.

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/ee872416.aspx
How to create VHD in win7. Note last I checked virtual pc couldn't mount a 64bit image (though the app comes in both 32/64 flavors not image support), so YMMV on that tool hence the other two options. Hyper-V covers that on MS side.
VirtualBox 3.2.+ can run 64bit 7 or Server 2008, vmware can host 64bit environments also. IMHO both are better than virtual pc (xp mode etc, whatever). XP Mode is only available for Windows 7 Professional, Enterprise, and Ultimate. But that doesn't stop you from using the others etc ;)

Forgot another usable virtual cd app.
http://www.dvdfab.cn/download.htm
http://www.dvdfab.cn/virtual-drive.htm
Another free one. DVDfab virtual drive. Not sure how good that is, I don't use that though I have the dvdfab installed and they make some great products for many ripping/copy jobs.

Before I forget, make a system repair disc and maybe a full system image also (windows backup etc) ;) System restore is always supposed to make a new restore point on app install but I never trust it myself and do it MANUALLY when doing anything that isn't a MS update (they get that right and always make one for these). I've seen too many times where other app installs oddly haven't made the restore point behind my back like its supposed to. So I do it myself, then install my app. Just a precaution.
http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows7/create-a-system-repair-disc
how to make repair disc.

Hope that helps anyone who doesn't want that dreaded OOPS moment ;) Of course it goes without saying we should all have a comprehensive backup strategy in place too. Everyone should install Threatfire if they don't have it also :) FREE & awesome on top of any AV suite and is very quiet with low resources used (basically none, 0% cpu most times, rock stable never a crash). These are all very well known apps, google reviews if worried. Threatfire is recommended by pcmag etc and I've installed it on top of just about every av suite out there for customers over the years.
www.pcworld.com/article/254748/pc_tools_threatfire_free.html
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2347573,00.asp

Understand it goes on top of, does not replace your AV. It pops up every few weeks or so to try to tell you to buy pctools and give you a statistics report but you just close it (it's a status report really that's all). Small price for such an effective app or you can elect to turn off the automatic report in General Settings. Some may want the info that pops up though.
http://www.threatfire.com/updates/
Can get info and download from there. Stay safe people :)