Windows 2000 on Compaq Presario R3000US

[Antillian]

I decided I wanted to dual boot Win XP Pro and Windows 2k Pro on my laptop. Until about 30 minutes ago everything was running fine, got all my drivers installed (or so I thought) fine and it was running great.

Well, I get to work today and decide I needed to install all the updates, so I install all the available updates, I reboot, and suddenly its not responding to my laptop keyboard, I can't even login! Yesterday when I installed I had this problem, but in safe mode it worked. I figured this had something to do with the drivers that run my keyboard and the drivers/progs that govern the quick launch (function) keys. So I installed what I thought were the drivers. Okay, rebooted, it worked fine in normal mode. It seems after I visited Windows Update it foobar'd it. Now I can't even use my keyboard in SAFE MODE! Has anyone had this problem or can give me any thoughts as to why this is occurring and how to fix it? Any help would be greatly appreciated. I'm not opposed to reinstalling, but I'd really like to avoid that seeing as how I just got finished setting everything up.

[Xaotic]

Try plugging in a USB keyboard. This may enable you to recover and reinstall the appropriate drivers.

[Pinky]

If you don't have a usb keyboard handy, boot from a windows 98se floppy/cd that has CD support (most of the 98se images out there include this), then run the setup prog ("winnt") from the w2k cd (in the i386 folder). This will start the windows 2k setup, follow the prompts to install a fresh copy but when it detects the existing copy and asks if you want to repair it, select that option. Do NOT use recovery console, that's for troubleshooting other types of issues. You need windows to redetect and install the hardware, and the only easy and foolproof way of doing this is to try an 'overlay' installation (also called a repair install). It keeps all existing files and updates, just reinstalls core components and hardware.

[Antillian]

Cool, thanks for the tips guys. I reinstalled 2k, and it happened again. I think I found the problem though, I think what was throwing it off was the progs/drivers that governed the touchpad on my laptop (Apoint). After I went in disabled that (using only my mouse =p), rebooted and it worked just fine. I don't use my touchpad much anyways so it's no big loss.

[Pinky]

There should be drive updates, or try the custom packagae compaq may have put together. I know the Dell touchpad utility is pretty useful on my laptop, turns off the touchpad for me automatically when a standard mouse is plugged in.