Hi all,

I have just bought a new mobo to replace a bust one.

I am using the same HD that had XP home installed on it.

I now own XP pro and when I installed the mobo, the system asked for a boot disk so I placed the XP pro disc in the drive. It seemed to be adding files and drivers for a few minutes. The keyboard worked fine during setup, I was able to select different options, until (I am an IDIOT!!!) I discovered that I had not attached the old HD.

Fast forward to another reboot after I had connected the old HD. Now, the system booted up to my old XP home desktop window and image with all my old desktop file shortcuts on show. However, now my keyboard (wired USB) dows not work, neither does my mouse (wireless, USB).

How do I get myself out of this predicament?

Thanks a million in advance.

I don't really understand on your situation .. More details please? It seems to me that you're running two HDD (the old one and the new one), but you want to run your old HDD for the primary boot drive.

OK, regarding the USB issue: do you have the USB to PS/2 converter? Use this and connect to PS/2. If you had two it will be better, if you had only one I recommend to use it on your mouse (you'll need mouse more than your keyboard in the meantime). After you connect to PS/2 port, boot and login to your windows. Once you get into windows and get your mouse running, go for device manager and find USB controllers part. You should see couple marked yellow with an asterisk. Uninstall everything, reboot, and install you mobo chipset driver. It should fix your problem.

Hope it helps.

cheers .. ^^

EDIT: just come to my mind when I read again your post.

From the title you said you want to change OS. In this case you would have no problem at all. Restart your system, boot from XP Pro boot disk, and install your new XP Pro. Done

cheers

What's the mobo?

Typically, you enable USB keyboard & mouse in bios to use them.

If your keyboard does not work at POST (you can't get into the BIOS) you will need a PS2 keyboard. If you don't have an old one laying around, you can pick up a cheap one just about anywhere for around 10 bucks.
Go into the the BIOS and enable USB support. Some baords do not have USB support enabled by default, or if you have jumpered the BIOS to reset it, it will disable USB support. I had an MSI board that did this.
Make sure you have the boot order set to your optical drive first, then the hard disk.
Restart with the Windows install disk in the CD drive, and reinstall Windows.

Not necessarily, some boards default to enabled USB keyboard & mouse. Gigabyte is one of them. Just clear cmos. Save $10.