no mouse, no kybd, flakey printer, and a blue screen!!..

[kotis]

I started getting messages that a new printer was found at XP Pro startup about a week ago. I installed, uninstalled and reinstalled, cancelled, even unplugged it.. and even get the message reboot after reboot. Incidentally the printer it identifies is my printer and always worked… this is like a phantom printer.

Then last night I began to have problems with my mouse, then my keyboard. I use a Logitech wireless mouse and keyboard. I installed, uninstalled, and reinstalled the drivers… now I get nothing. I have plugged in my old PS2 mouse and keyboard and the computer can not see them either.

I have tried to boot from the XP disk so I can boot in safe mode or something, but because it wants you to click any key to boot from the XP CD it boots from the HDD.

I am suspecting that something is wrong with the USB controller, the motherboard or the power supply.

Yesterday I noticed that the power supply was hot and found that the fan was not turning. So one thought is that the power supply is not generating that proper voltage due to damage… even though the fan is now replaced…

How do I force the computer to boot from the CD without a keyboard or mouse?
Is there a way to create a boot CD or boot 3.5 that will auto boot to test the motherboard with out a keyboard or mouse…

I think I will change out the power supply tonight, just to eliminate that…
I am really suspicious that the keyboard and mouse drivers are simply corrupt or blown away since I could see no keyboard drivers in the properties … (back last night when the mouse was working) … and now when I boot and the various interrupts are listed by the bios during boot… I see that input devices is listed as N/A

So does that mean there is a motherboard issue or does the OS actually provide these somehow during boot??

Oh and about every 5th time I get a blue screen... stating FASTFAT did something so XP is shutting down to protect me. Both my HDDs are NTFS... and I have nothing in the other drives...

I get a differenent blue screen whenever my I plug the Logitech tranceiver into the USB port... so I stopped doing that... and now keep trying variations with the PS2 mouse and keyboard

 

[smah]

It sounds like you've got a bunch of stuff going on. First, with a known good PS2 keyboard connected (and wireless disconnected) start the computer and see if you can access the CMOS setup by pressing Delete, F1, or whatever combination is shown on the screen. If the keyboard isn't working at this point, there may be something wrong with the motherboard. Just make sure that you know this PS2 keyboard works by trying it on a working machine and make sure you don't plug or unplug it while the computer is on.

 

[MOTONEX]

As smah says, any way of getting an input device which works(such as USB keyboard or serial mouse etc.) would simplify matters. With a working keyboard, you can try booting into Safe Mode, or access the BOIS.

If the CD is included in the boot sequence in the BIOS, you could force it to boot from CD by disconnecting the HDDs prior to powering up. Alternatively, you could run diagnostics from autoexec.bat on a floppy. However, none of this is going to help you if you've toasted the motherboard. Perhaps the BIOS itself has got corrupted ...

The fact that FASTFAT has been invoked on an NTFS system does seem to indicate things have got a bit screwed.