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General discussion

Flash drive disabled my PS/2 ports

Jan 18, 2005 12:36PM PST

OS: Win XP Pro.
Dell Dimension XPS 1450

I have 2 PS/2 ports and 2 USB ports all 4 of which have worked fine simultaneously. I have plugged in and unplugged a flash (or ?jump?) drive into the available USB port dozens of times with no problem.

For some reason yesterday I plugged in the flash drive and everything froze. OK, just unplug it and reboot, right? Wrong.

I rebooted a dozen times and could not log on because neither the mouse nor the keyboard (connected to the PS/2 ports) were working. Boot-up went normally but I could only get to the logon screen.

After a couple hours of troubleshooting I figured out that when I plugged in the flash drive it somehow disabled both PS/2 ports. My 2 USBs work fine so I swapped mouse and keyboard with USB devices and they work perfectly. I had not previously added any new hardware or software.

Is there any way to display properties of my PS/2 ports from Device Manager? All I know it that they?re both dead and don?t really know where to begin troubleshooting.

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