Hello to all, I got roped into helping an in law with an old 486 lagacy machine. There are no pci slots or IDE channels on the mobo, just ISA slots, populated by the I/O board which controls the mouse serial port, the 5.24 floppy, and the hard drive; a video card, and a SB Awe 64 sound card. I formatted the drive, and installed DOS 5.0 followed by Win 3.1. This was a challenge for me, as I have forgotten A LOT of DOS commands. At any rate, I had no mouse. System kept saying no mouse attached. I installed mouse drivers, and the problem persisted. I then used a Win98 boot disc to install the CD rom drivers and loaded up WIN95 Upgrade, in the hopes that it would find the mouse....no luck. Same error message No mouse attached. I looked in device manager and there is no reference to a mouse. I cannot check the device IRQ settings without a mouse, and I'm kind of stuck. I have tried several mice, and replace the serial/ PS/2 mouse adaptor all to no avail. Could there be some sort of hardware conflict? I don't know how or where to look in DOS to check for hardware addresses. Any help would be greatly appreciated; I would like to get this thing out of my hair. Thanks, Phil

most anything a mouse can do can also be done by your keyboard...it's a matter of knowing the correct keys to press. If you cannot remove the video card (meaning no onboard graphics capability), then try removing the sound card and possibly reinstalling the OS. If you boot from floppy is there any clue about the mouse being detected? Has it been disabled in the BIOS?

In my experience, serial mice are a hundred times more reliable than PS2 mice. Have your tried a serial mouse? Also, I have never seen a PS2 to serial adapter that worked without a special driver. Furthermore, it has also been my experience that when a mouse is not recognised, the fault is at the bios level, never with the operating system. HTH