My 90 year old mother is bedridden and wanted her Windows 2000 Compaq desktop computer moved across the room closer to her bed. To move it, we had to disconnect all devices from their previously convoluted arrangement. We re-plugged the monitor, keyboard and mouse. Now the system boots to Windows. You know the keyboard is not broken because F keys are functional before Windows loads. You know the optical mouse is not broken because it lights up. However, when Windows starts you see that "New hardware has been found - Keyboard" and "New hardware has been found - Mouse" and in each case the user is supposed to press an OKAY button to continue - but you find you have no input device active with which to press that OKAY button ! ! ! ! ! What to do? Can this situation be saved? Will reinstalling W2000 or any version of Windows fix the problem? Thanks in advance for any help you can give. I plan to travel 2 hours to her home tomorrow (10/21) and hope I can have a solution in hand. Rena

Hi, try to put your operating system cd in optical unit and run a "sfc /scannow" command. HTHEdoardo Benussi - Microsoft MVP Management Infrastructure - Systems Administration https://mvp.support.microsoft.com/Profile/Benussi Windows Server Italian Forum Moderator edo[at]mvps[dot]org

thanks. Having trouble getting past the boot options. I can't seem to successfully "boot w/command prompt" - when I use the F5 and select that boot option, the system seems to hang in the file load process (after displaying one or two screens full of files loaded), never finishing and returning me to a DOS prompt. If I pick one of the Windows options (normal or safe mode), I'm stuck with no keyboard or mouse so I don't have the option to go to DOS from Windows, or run a specific command from the Start menu. I don't have a way to type in a command because once I'm into Windows I have no keyboard. My instinct was to try to look at the registry and see if I could force defacto recognition of the devices, but - again - can't seem to get to a command prompt. Tried multiple times. Thanks for responding. I welcome any other ideas you may have. Rena

So the kid at my local computer store came up with what I hope is the solution. He sold me, for $5, an old PC keyboard with a purple PS2 connector. Since the keyboard will be essentially hardwired into the machine using that purple connector, it should bypass Windows' treatment as a "newly found device." I'll have the use of the keyboard automatically when Windows loads and can then accept Windows' device installation of the mouse. Will know Thursday if this solution is successful and will only post here if the solution did NOT work. Thanks, all. Rena