Help-Keyboard dies, mouse stops working when key pressed

[haunted420]

Help! The problem is this. I can't login to my windows xp account. My cpu boots as normal, but when the password prompt appears, the keyboard will not work. Also, the mouse stops working as soon as a key is pressed. This happened after a power flicker which resulted in an unplanned reboot of my cpu.
The keyboard also works just fine up until the password prompt appears, ie. I can navigate BIOS etc... and for the record, yes I have tried several different keyboards and mice.

I have read about other accounts of this happening, though a USB keyboard and/or mouse are involved in most cases. Not this one though, both of mine are ps/2. Most other accounts of this seem to be due to a ?random switching of IRQ's which then creates a conflict?. All replies to this problem involve tweaking from inside XP, but in my case I can't, because I can't type my password to log in. I'm fairly confident I could dig and fix the problem given I could get into at least the device manager but as I've said, no way to do so. I dug around in some online help sites a bit trying to find either a way to bypass my login pw, or to automatically have it entered in using "bootcfg /p" from the ASR, though I'm not sure that this is possible.

Any advice on what to do from here would be much appreciated, as I'm stuck and have no idea what to do.

I would like to know..
Number one - What causes and how to fix the original problem of the mouse/keyboard conflict, and...

Number two, how to get past my password, because I'm pretty sure number one will require number two ;P

Thanks in advance guys,
-Mystified in Michigan

 

[Osiris]

safemode?

last known good configuration?

reset cmos?

 

[haunted420]

Yes, and yes. No good.

The CMOS though...not familiar with it, explain please?

 

[Osiris]

open the case up, look for a small silver watch battery, take it out for 5 minutes, put it back in

 

[haunted420]

Ahh, right right. A quick question though. What exactly does this do, and what other changes can I expect? Any reinstalling drivers here and there, anything of that sort?

 

[Osiris]

nothing to do with drivers, just resets everything back to default...

 

[haunted420]

Did that, it started up, beeping and making a fuss about the fan not being on? I continued anyway, and it asked to either run setup (F1), or to load the defaults (F2). So I loaded the defaults and it gave a reboot. There was no fan warning this time, though my original problem still exists.

????

 

[haunted420]

Well how about that. After hours and hours of digging in forum after forum, I've found an easy answer.

solution is to boot in the recovery console, and write cmd: copy c:\windows\repair\system c:\windows\system32\config ... it will copy 1 file (overwrite - yes), keyboard and mouse on ps/2 should now working.

Like a charm.

 

[Osiris]

good job, did you find it here?