Ghosting Vista to replace hard drive results in keyboard failure?

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1

Hello,

 

My workstation has the main harddrive is clicking (the click of death no doubt) so they sent me a new drive of the same capacity.


I decided to clone the old, failing, drive over to the new one to save me the hassle of having to do everything all over again(I hate moving in to a new home) - using Norton Ghost 14.

Anyway, the cloning went well and I was able to pull the wires on the old one and boot the machine up on the new drive- MBR intact and everything - The only problem is, that it ignores any keyboard input.

It will freely acknowledge input from the mouse, no matter where i plug the mouse in or whichever mouse I pick up from the junkstore down the street - It will acknowledge a PS/2 mouse as well as an USB one. But it will completely ignore the keyboard no matter which port it is in, or if its a USB or a PS/2 keyboard. So I cant get past the login screen!

I have rebooted the machine a couple of times to see if that fixed it. And I tried plugging in a Vista DVD to do a repair or whatever - and the thing does not really give me many options to play with. I click on 'repair this computer', it finds the vista installation, but from that point there isnt much I can do. I dont have any recovery points on the machine so thats a void, and the thing apparently cant find any start up problems (seeing as according to vista the bootup process is at all times succesful even if it hasnt found a keyboard).

Did the HID drivers become corrupted when I cloned the drive? What can I do? The last option is to do a full system restore from the  recovery disks that I created when I first got the machine, but then I would end up loosing the customization and applications that I have installed. 


The keyboard by the way - works in the bios and in the windows vista installation routine - its just when I actually start the thing up from the drive and off the fresh disk that it goes wrong.

The old drive still works and the keyboard works when I boot off that.

If you have any advices to give, I'd gladly hear them! I need to fix this one way or another before I change station in a low one digit days.

2

Hi,

 

I had exactly the same situation and didn't manage to get the cloned disk to work.

 

Instead I had to create a restore point on a second disk and use that to create my new disk which then worked.

 

So there seems to be a problem with cloning an active system disc under Vista.


 

 

 

3

What happens if you try to boot into safe mode?  Since the keyboard is recognized before you get to Winlogon, can you initiate safe mode (using F8)? 

4

I tried that, but the minute I get to the login screen the keyboard is dead.

 

I put another hard drive in, to test, and made a fresh Vista installation on it - everything works just fine there. Keyboard and everything.

5

Let me look into something for you.  Will respond once I know more.

 

6

When you did the fresh image, was that with the same keyboard?  I’m assuming the keyboard still works on another computer as well, correct?  If it’s not the keyboard what you can do is boot from the recovery disk you can open an old backup with the image browser and restore that version of the HID driver.  That should get you a good copy of the device driver. 

7

It was with the same keyboard, and the keyboard works on other machines. The problem with doing what you suggest is that I had no recovery points created until just now - That is, after the hardware problem (failing harddisk) occured, was not until then that I realized that I had ******* up and should have made regular backups from the beginning.

 

Ce' la Vie

8

Other option then.  If you can download a copy of the driver files needed and save on a thumb drive, you can use the image browser in the recovery disk to open command prompt, copy the new driver copy to the location of the corrupted copy. 

Message Edited by erik_carlstrom on 03-25-2009 11:04 AM