Windows not recognizing mouse or keyboard

Question

I purchased myself a Wild Dog Performance from System76 for Christmas and I am loving it; I've been forced to use Windows at work and having a machine that runs Ubuntu perfectly is a welcome relief from that. However, I have heard great things about several Windows-exclusive games that can't run under Wine that I want to play. When trying to install Win7, however, Windows ignored my USB mouse and keyboard. I also tried a PS/2 keyboard and another mouse and keyboard in different ports, none of which worked either. All of these peripherals work out of the box under Ubuntu on the same computer and under Windows and Mac on other computers. It should also be noted that these peripherals run perfectly in the UEFI screen, so the little light in my mouse is on from as soon as I boot up to just after the Windows boot screen appears.

I read around and decided the best thing I could do was to set up a raw disk virtual machine in VirtualBox and try to install there. I managed to install Windows 7 and some of the System76 drivers, but most were refused because the hardware they were designed for wasn't present. I then rebooted into Windows, and once again it didn't register my keyboards (PS/2 or USB) or my mice (USB only).

I own a copy of Windows 7 Professional, and I was installing the 64-bit version to take advantage of my large amounts of memory that are required to run a few of my games.

Answer 1

I was in a similar situation, I just got a System76 Gazelle Professional and my USB mouse / keyboard were not working on Windows 7. The drivers System76 offer (at least for my model) are not the most accurate, as the Ethernet / WiFi drivers didn't seem to work and I had to instead install official drivers from Intel. Thus, I figured that either system76 forgot to provide a USB bus driver, or the "chipset" driver was supposed to include the USB driver but didn't. Either way, I knew I needed to figure out exactly what hardware it was and install the correct driver.

To solve this, I installed Belarc Advisor, a free program that gives you surprisingly detailed info about the hardware in your computer. With this I figured out the exact name of the USB bus, and I googled it and installed the corresponding driver from Intel.

Hope that helps!