Continuing from Toshiba laptop fun, as an experiment, I took another 2.5" sata hard drive from a Dell laptop (with O.S.) and it booted up and the mouse and keyboard worked! So, the problem exists on the hard drive and its not hardware related. I took the original hard drive and scanned it for viruses and found a couple, nothing earth shattering, put it back in and the same results, a useless laptop. For safety sake (and data retention) I cloned the hard drive to another (same size 120Gb, also sata, a 3.5 though) hard drive so I could experiment further with no data loss. If my next move doesn't work, I can just clone back the other (3.5" to 2.5")way and I'm back at step 1.
I then took the extra step of using Window XP to delete the partitions (yes, plural, many computers come with 2 partitions, one hidden so the manufacturer can keep their secret stuff away from you) on the drive then made 1 partition and formatted that. Extra work maybe, but no trace of a virus could linger and no prior problems could exist. A clean slate to start with.
After all this screwing around, down to business. Using the restore disks (most people lose these) I went through the restore procedure and chose the original configuration (like the day it was bought) and let it do it's thing. I won't bore you with the details, just yes I agree, blah, blah ,blah.
And. It. Worked! The system boots up fine and the mouse and keyboard are responsive. In retrospect, it would have been easier if I had one of those flashy thingies from "Men in Black" but in effect, that's kind of what I did, it just took longer.
Devices and/or software used in this article are: SIIG Cool Dual SATA to USB 2.0 Docking Station, Inland SATA/IDE Combo Drive Adapter USB 2.0 and Seagate Diskwizard (comes with a Seagate hard drive) software.
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