USB Keyboard & Mouse Drivers Not Loading Properly

I'm having a lot of "fun" with a 3rd-party Dell with Windows 7 Pro x64 installed.

The complaint was that a fake support company had locked Windows with an unknown password. The first thing I did was make a full backup of the drive, so we're good there.

I connected the drive to another machine and scanned it with MWB and Windows Defender. MWB removed some junk but WD found nothing. I replaced the registry hives from the RegBack folder, and with the drive back in its own machine the password prompt was now gone; Windows logs in automatically straight to the desktop.

The problem now is that I have been unable to get a mouse or keyboard working in Windows. The board has no ps2 port, so I'm limited to USB devices (there is a serial port, but I don't have a serial mouse). If I boot with the keyboard or mouse plugged in, there is nothing unusual observed about the boot process (other than that Windows is delaying login with an activation prompt). If I move the kb or mouse to another USB port, or plug them in after login, I see the notification that Windows is installing a driver for the device. This is eventually replaced by the prompt "device driver software was not successfully installed".

The keyboard and mouse both work in the BIOS setup. They both work when I boot from a Windows 7 Installer USB. When I boot into safe mode they don't work (the mouse optic turns off when "classpnp.sys" is the last line displayed). When I boot into Windows recovery, they work, but there is no restore point to go back to.

I reset the BIOS to defaults and checked that everything to do with USB is set correctly. I tried dropping the BIOS updater exe file into the user startup folder, but the installer won't complete without interaction.

I tried opening the admin network shares from another machine on the network, but this doesn't work due to the user having no password. psexec fails for the same reason.

I considered dropping a batch file into the startup folder to initiate sysprep with generalisation, but I haven't tried it yet. I'm not sure it will work without privilege escalation. I'm also wondering if I can activate the admin account with a password from a recovery command line.

Can anybody suggest how to get kb and mouse working on this machine without reinstalling Windows?

AddRAM said:

Who`s PC is this ?

Not mine. I'm doing work on it at the request of the owner.

What is a 3rd party Dell ?

A Dell computer that is owned by somebody else.

Is this PC new to you ?

I first laid hands on it last week.

In my opinion, why DON`T you reinstall windows, it would be best.

That will be the solution of last resort. I prefer to leave any installed programs intact, because I don't know at this point what issues I would run into with finding installers, license keys, etc.

Sorry for the blatant questions, but when we see people trying to bypass passwords, circumnavigate this, find ways around that etc, we tend to get suspicious, we are not allowed to help people get around passwords and such.

Fair enough, but there is no password on the computer at this point. I can reconnect the drive to another machine and read the files easily enough, I'm just trying to figure out how to get the kb and mouse working.

Does the PC have a COA with a readable activation key ?

It has two COAs. One is for Vista and has a readable key. The other is for Windows 7 Pro for refurb PCs, with no printed key. I assume I could pull a key from the registry. Whether it would be valid for reactivating or just a generic OEM key I don't know at this point.

And just to update my progress, I was able to enable the administrator account with a password by booting into recovery with a command prompt, but then Windows would not boot after that. Fortunately an automatic restore point had been created in the interim, so after rolling back to the only restore point it is booting into Windows again, but I'm back to where I was when I started this thread, with no kb or mouse driver, and no remote access.

The drive is back in the Dell. I have tried one kb and two mice connected to all 8 USB ports in turn. I have also tried the same kb and mouse through a USB KVM switch.

When I plug a device in while at the Windows desktop it tries to install a driver and fails. If I boot with the device connected then I see no evidence of a driver install attempt.

It is not activated now, but my understanding is that it was activated before the scammer got into it.

According to the link here, this can be a side effect of undoing the syskey password encryption, which is the first thing I did after making a backup. I didn't follow the instructions on this site, so I really can't say what caused the activation to become invalid.

How to remove Syskey and Administrator password

In any case, I have talked to the owner and their preference is to just reinstall windows, so that's the path we're taking. Thanks for your assistance.