[bobhjon]

I have a generic, PS2 keyboard connected to a WinXP Pro system. I get no error message at startup, but the keyboard simply doesn't work. I've tried substituting a Memorex keyboard and rebooting but still no error message, and still no keyboard functions. I'm at a loss here; does WinXP have a keyboard driver that may be corrupted or is there something in the startup routine that could be missing or go bad? Anybody have any ideas of what the problem might be?

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Hi and welcome go Geeks to Go. Search at M$ for keyboard driver gets 100 hits. This is a good one to start with. http://support.micro...kb;en-us;258826
Go to M$ and do a search if this one does not help.

[austin_o]

Hi and welcome go Geeks to Go. Search at M$ for keyboard driver gets 100 hits. This is a good one to start with. http://support.micro...kb;en-us;258826
Go to M$ and do a search if this one does not help.

[bobhjon]

Austin ...
I should have said that one of the first things I tried was reinstalling the driver, but, the Device Manager did not show any keyboard, and, after plugging the keyboard back in, the system did not detect that a new device had been added. After your note, for which I thank you, I tried this again with the same non-result. I had earlier tried a search at M$, but there was so much rubbish that after 2 hours, I just gave up ever expecting to be able to find anything of value at M$.
The keyboard has been running fine in the same computer for over a year, and its failure probably occurred during a normal reboot. Is there some way to force XP to install a driver rather than by expecting it to detect the driverless device? ... bobhjon

[Samm]

Does the keyboard work in a pure dos environment (i.e boot from a floppy disk & try it) or in the bios?

[bobhjon]

I tried that and the answer is that it still won't work when booted with an old MSDOS 6 floppy.

[austin_o]

It may be the PS2 port is bad. You said you swapped out the keyboard and still had the same problem. Have you verified both of the keyboards you tried work in another system? This would eliminate the keyboards as the problem. You said it does not work in dos mode when you booted to a floppy. This sounds more like a hardware problem (like the port) rather than a driver issue. Can you try a USB keyboard?