Windows 7 - USB keyboard and mouse do not work once Windows starts

Were working fine yesterday. Today I return home and find computer had mysteriously turned itself on. Mouse not working but keyboard allows me to try to shut down. Taking very long time so shut down with power button.

Now my keyboard and mouse both do not work on Windows login screen. Same for safe mode. Before this, in BIOS, other screens can get to by holding down keys as computer starts, keyboard works.

As Windows loads, can see keyboard illumination switches off. Same for mouse laser. My other USB peripherals (extra HD and wireless thingy) still have lights on. Fairly new computer. Cost me £300 new about 6 months ago.

I tried to 'roll back' Windows - there was only one option - for when I installed Itunes maybe a week ago, but that failed.

I chacked inside and outside the case to see if there's any sockets for PS/2 keyboards, but there aren't any.

Any idea what's going on? Thanks for any help.

If you can not open the BIOS screen with USB keyboard, use a PS/2 keyboard for the setting.

Open the BIOS screen and enable Legacy support for USB keyboard and mouse. This should do the trick.

Thanks. The keyboard works fine in BIOS though. It stops working once Windows loads. I have tested 2 USB keyboards. With illuminated keyboard, can see lights go out when Windows loads too.

Looking in BIOS, I can see no option to toggle legacy keyboard support, but if I go to Advanced->USB Ports, I can see that it says "The USB keyboard connected to a disabled USB port can still be used for <F10=Setup> entry if no PS/2 keyboard is available.

In the list of USB ports, 0-9 are enabled. I did have a USB adapter plugged into 1 of the 7 ports on my computer, with 4 outputs, taking me up to 10 ports. This has been in my computer for ages and worked fine. Is this likely to be a problem?

I've got some ideas to try. Please say if they are stupid or if you have better ideas. If not I'll probably go buy the stuff tomorrow and have a bash.

1) Get an adaptor USB to internal hard drive, take out my drive, plug it into my netbook, copy all my important stuff across.

Then try, assuming that such cards exist at Maplin:

2) Get a card to give me ps/2 slots, and get some ps/2 to usb adaptors to plug my keyboard and mouse in bypassing the usb ports, then hopefully get into Windows and do something to fix the drivers! Perhaps this way i can burn some recovery discs and do a repair install.

failing 2) maybe

3) Reset to factory settings (there is an option to do this if i press f11 at startup), then set up my computer all over again. This will probably be a massive pain the the ass and I don't want to do it unless i really have to.


Secret option 4) Repair install. Not sure how to do this. I hear this might require disks, which I don't have. Is it possible to repair install from the recovery partition?

Secret option 5) something to do with linux. I heard you can get a disc that will load linux, and you can then mess around with your windows files. If I knew which bits to delete maybe I could do that. I don't really know which bits i should be messing with so maybe i should skip this.

If I don't let you know how I got on tomorrow, assume I've screwed up my netbook too!

What kind of BIOS do you have? See if you can find an option called EHCI Hand-Off or similar; it's related to the USB port controller settings so you'd find it in that same area.

If you find this setting, is it enabled or disabled? Try changing that setting and rebooting. (If that has no effect, change it back to what it was before just to avoid introducing another unknown variable into your repair efforts.)

The nearest I can find to "ECHI hand off" is SATA1 Controller Mode, which is set to [ACHI] and can be set to [IDE]. I think this has something to do with the hard disk and am wary of messing with it. The options in the "USB Ports" menu don't give any option to switch to USB 1.

Learned how to put Ubuntu on a pen drive, boot that and access my files. I have backed my important files up now, so if I break it it's not the end of the world. Next I'm going to have a stab at changing the Windows USB drivers using Ubuntu.

UPDATE 24/10/11
I went with a factory reinstall in the end.

I tried copying some drivers from my good computer and that failed.
I made a bootable USB drive with Windows on it, but it turned out to give the same options as pressing F11 whilst loading - i read somewhere to actually do a "repair install" you have to be in Windows.

Maybe there is a way to get out of my predicament by changing the right files, but I've already spent a weekend on this. Still need to reinstall everything, (and uninstall a lot of crapware) but in the grand scheme of things, that's not a massive hardship.

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