I have encountered the USB mouse of death!

The machine is a 2.17 GHz single core with 1.5Gb of RAM and a single 160Mb PATA drive running Vista Home Premium SP2.

I connected the USB mouse and keyboard from a nearby XP Pro SP3 box and tried to boot. At first it wouldn't, then I got to the BIOS screen that gave me a hard drive error message.

I was contemplating taking out the HDD and slaving it to another machine to run diagnostics, but decided to use Hiren's boot CD instead.

I got to the Hiren's screen and realised that neither the mouse nor keyboard were working..........I tried different USB slots with no effect.

OK, I thought, I will try PS2, and disconnected the mouse, at which point the keyboard numlock light came on????????????????

I attached a PS2 mouse and rebooted and the machine went into Windows just fine..............there is nothing wrong with the HDD!!!!!

I have not seen anything like this before, but have made a mental note to check the boot with all USB devices disconnected in future. In this case it took me to the Windows login screen.

It would have been a waste of money to buy a new HDD and go through reinstalling the software.

I know the mouse worked on the XP box, but haven't tried a different USB one on the Vista machine yet.