Windows 7 Any options other than reinstall? Save my lifeless brick!

kalor

New Member
Hi guys,

Here is the story of my sad spiral into doom:

1) I use a SmartNav head tracker (hands-free mouse). One day it started giving choppy performance in first person shooters. It seemed to be due to a dodgy webcam driver I'd installed. No problem, right? I used Win7 restore points to roll my system back a week to before I installed the webcam driver.

2) This did nothing but cause Win7 to not recognise any new USB devices. When I plugged something in, I got the little popup that said it was searching for a driver for the new device, but it would never find it. Not even on devices I used all the time. I tried different devices and USB ports to no avail.

3) I read up on this forum and others. The consensus seemed to be "Go into device manager and uninstall your USB ports. Win7 will just reinstall them on startup". So I did, and it didn't. This left me with a brick that didn't recognise a mouse or keyboard!

4) I borrowed a PS/2 mouse from a friend and could get in, and could use the Win7 onscreen keyboard. I copied some valuable files to a detachable USB drive that had already been plugged in, then went back into device manager and installed a mouse and keyboard device driver it recommended. The only effect this had was to KILL THE PS/2 MOUSE!

I now have a brick that starts up and goes to the desktop fine, it just won't accept any input, even in safe mode!!

The startup fixing utility thingy did nothing.
If I go into the bios setup the keyboard is fine (grrrr).
If I boot from my Win7 CD, It can only see the detachable drive and not the C: drive (WTF??), so I can't get to any other restore points.
I didn't have RDP enabled, so I can't remote desktop to it.

I really don't want to start from scratch, I'm not sure I can find all my disks with graphics card drivers etc. I also still have some valuable files I didn't copy off my C:, although a friend assures me that reinstalling Windows 7 won't kill my files.

Do I have any other option than a reinstall?
 
Do you have a repair CD or a full Install DVD?

Can you get into the Repair senario (F8 or boot to DVD/CD) and select Last known good configuration, or something similar.

Can you get into a command window using the previous methods?

Have you shut the system all the way down prior to rebooting?

Have you removed all the USB devices, reboot and then reinstall a mouse and keyboard?

Make sure all batteries in any wireless devices are good.
 
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