No ps2 ports
I am trying to repair a dell dimension 5150c with an umnountable boot volume. I have a repair bootdisc, which will boot up pcs with this fault. However the dell only has usb ports for the keyboard & mouse and no ps2 sockets. What happens is that the keyboard is not recognised as the usb has not activated, normally I do not get this problem as ps2 ports are recognised as soon as thew bios boots up, this means that I can not activate my boot disc as it tells me there is no keyboard attached.
I ca not fit a pc card with ps2 ports on as there is no space in the pc.
I ca not fit a pc card with ps2 ports on as there is no space in the pc.
oh - it's a slim PC, so you need low-profile PCI cards.
You should probably upgrade your Live CD. Knoppix and UBCD.
Here's how to put UBCD on a USB drive:
http://www.pendrivelinux.com/install-and-boot-ultimate-boot-cd-ubcd-from-a-usb-device/
Knoppix:
http://knopper.net/knoppix-mirrors/index-en.html
Or, you could set the HD up in a slave box. This is usually what IT professionals do.
Here's how to put UBCD on a USB drive:
http://www.pendrivelinux.com/install-and-boot-ultimate-boot-cd-ubcd-from-a-usb-device/
Knoppix:
http://knopper.net/knoppix-mirrors/index-en.html
Or, you could set the HD up in a slave box. This is usually what IT professionals do.
ASKER
You cant slave the drive as it has a active partiton with windows on, and a differnet motherboard, etc drivers on - this causes a clash on the machine it is slaved with ( triedit.)
I already use ubcd, but as I originally pointed out all these type of bootup discs, bootup the machine before it has loaded the drivers for the usb ports - therefore when the pc says "press any key to boot from cd" I can't as the keyboard hasnt activated. This problem does not arise with ps2 ports.
I need to be able to load a set of usb drivers for the keyboard.
I already use ubcd, but as I originally pointed out all these type of bootup discs, bootup the machine before it has loaded the drivers for the usb ports - therefore when the pc says "press any key to boot from cd" I can't as the keyboard hasnt activated. This problem does not arise with ps2 ports.
I need to be able to load a set of usb drivers for the keyboard.
ASKER CERTIFIED SOLUTION
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This solution does not make much sense to me. How did this work? The KVM is PS2 to USB? KVM boxes are not to be confused with PS2 to USB adapters.
ASKER
The problem I had was that there is no ps2 ports on the pc, keyboard/mouse are usb (as originally stated). You can get different types of kvm boxes, ie: kvm with ps2 connections or kvm with usb. I purchased a usb kvm, therefore I plugged a usb keyboard/mouse into the kvm and the usb kvm leads into the pc. There are also spare usb ports on the kvm box, which allows you to plug a usb external hdd into the box. The kvm box seems to recognise usb pheriphals on bootup. This allowed keyboard to be booted on startup, allowing me to reload windows, and then load a bootdisc file recovery and save the files to an external hdd. Note: this only seems to work with the box type kvm and not the 2port switch type.
or
You say there's no space, are all the PCI ports full? Why don't you remove one of the PCI cards? What are they? You could easily remove a dial-up modem or TV card etc, install the PS2 card, run the repair then reinstall the card you removed.