PC will not recognize Serial Mouse? 3

[perryarrow]

have an NT workstation that was setup with a serial mouse. No Ps/2. Using Service Pack 5. Added a touchscreen monitor. The touchscreen used the 2nd serial port. All was fine, able to use both touchscreen and mouse, until one day.. The mouse would not work. Messed around to no avail. Uninstalled the touchscreen. Still the mouse is not working. Tried reloading the mouse driver. No go. Checked both serial ports with dumb terminal and loop back, OK.
How can I get the workstation to recognize the serial mouse?

 

[RachelD]

have you checked to make sure nothing has been changed in the BIOS?

 

[perryarrow]

I checked the BIOs out. The serial ports appear to be Enabled. This unit has a plug N play BIOS.
I am not sure what else to look for in the
BIOS. I am not a very experienced NT type.
The mouse dialog does not provide any means of selecting where to find the mouse.

 

[RachelD]

sorry for the basic questions, but did you try a new mouse?

 

[perryarrow]

Yes to trying different mouse.
Some update. On Bootup there is an error generated. Checked event viewer.
Says Boot-start or system start driver(s) failed to load.
SerMouse

How do I get it to load?

I also came up with a Y type cable that allowed me to use the PS/2 type plug which the keboard was using with the a mouse. This worked. I Still get the error on boot up about the device failure.
I still would like to know how to get the serial mouse to work even though I have a solution with the Y cable.

Thanks

 

[2ffat]

This is just a wild, hare-brained idea...are you sure the serial port is active? My machine has two serial ports but only one is active. The other's address is being used by the PS2 port. It is completely dead. Have you run some hardware diagnostics with a null cable on the port?

James P. Cottingham

http://www.ivcusa.com

 

[perryarrow]

Yes I did a loop back test with dumb Terminal on each port and they responded.
I think the issue now is why the sermouse driver will not load. Using the Mouse dialog in Control panel I had tried to reload the driver and it seemed to work. But it does not want to start. Under control Panel/Devices Sermouse is listed as not started. Try to start it and I get an error.

Thanks for the input.

Perry

 

[2ffat]

Have you checked your Event Viewer to see if there is a problem when NT tried to load the driver?

James P. Cottingham

http://www.ivcusa.com

 

[perryarrow]

Yes to checking the event viewer. As mentioned in a previous reply I get the following.
Says Boot-start or system start driver(s) failed to load.
SerMouse.

Question is why did it fail to load? What do I check for?

 

[jeromec]

Have you tried to apply Service Pack for NT? The latest is 6a, but you can use the one that you are provided with.

The SerMouse device can be started in the Devices property of Control Panel. I am sure that it is Startup Automatic, but just give it a check.

Jerome

 

[perryarrow]

Hey all thanks for the input. As I said before I am now working using a Y cable and sharing the 1 PS2 port with the Keyboard and Mouse. I went into the Device Property in Control Panel and disabled the Sermouse driver that was giving me the failure at start up.
I have also reinstalled the touchscreen software and it is working fine. Funny though, the touchscreen uses the serial port. So now I am even more curious as to why the touchscreen was able to get the serial port to work and I was not.
Is there something in the Registry file that gets modified?
If so what?
Maybe I need to learn more about the Registry file, maybe that is where one can manually make things work when the automatic stuff doesn't?

It amazes me that something so simple turns into something so complex?
Anyway
Everyone have a nice Holiday!

 

[dxd]

Although you seem to have found a solution to your problem I have some additional detail or steps you may want to try to find out the root cuase of the original issue.

By default ntdetect will check for the presence of a serial mouse during boot. I have come across problems with this when I have a serial cable attached to my router. NT thinks it is a mouse and will fail to load the mouse driver.

The workaround for this is to either prevent NT from looking at the Com ports altogether or prevent it from looking at one specific port.

I would recommend that you try the following:

Edit the boot.ini (change the attributes from read-only) and append the following parameter to your default boot configuration option../NoSerialMice:COMx where x = the port where the Touchscreen is installed.
e.g. multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINNT /NoSerialMice:COM1

Have your mouse connected to COM2 and see if that works. You should also re-enable the SerMouse device as you indicated earlier you disabled it to get rid of the event error.



Doug
dxd_2000@yahoo.com

 

[perryarrow]

Dxd
Finally had a chance to try your suggestion.
It did not work.
The set-up. I had keyboard plugged into PS2 port. The touchscreen plugged into COM1 and the Mouse plugged into COM2. I enabled the Sermouse Driver, (System).
Added the line of code to the Boot.ini. I made COM1 the choice not to look at.
On reboot the first thing that I noted was I had 3 choices nstead of 2 on the boot selection screen. In addition to the standard and VGA selections I had 'Default NT' as a choice.
If I choose #3 Default NT I get the following error.
OS Loader V4.01
Windows NT Could ot Start because the following file is missing or corrupt:
<Winntroot>\System32\ntoskrnl.exe
Reinstall a copy of the above file.

I have to Ctrl alt del to continue.
If I choose the normal choice #1, the PC boots normal and I get the device load failure message. Everything works normal then except of course the mouse.

Any suggestions?

Thanks for all the information.

 

[dxd]

PerryArrow,

Paste a copy of your boot.ini file in the thread so we can take a look at it. There is a problem if you noticed anything different with the boot menu...the changes that were to be made should be transparent.

Doug
dxd_2000@yahoo.com

 

[perryarrow]

dxd
I took another look at the Boot.ini. Here it is.

[boot loader]
timeout=30
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINNT
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINNT=&quot;Windows NT Workstation Version 4.00&quot;
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINNT=&quot;Windows NT Workstation Version 4.00 [VGA mode]&quot; /basevideo /sos

I originally had added your suggested code at the end of the 'default' line.
After reading your response I went and tried the code at the end of the line with the menu choice text.(The first line after '[operating systems]. And you are right it is transparent. So transparent, though, that it did not solve the serial mouse problem.

When I get the chance I may try the touchscreen in COM 2 and the ser mouse in COM1. Then I will add the Boot.ini code as above and tell it not to look at COM2 instead of COM1. Previously I had tried switching the touchscreen to the different COM ports and it had no problems picking it up.

Again thanks for the info

Perry