No keyboard/mouse on migrated WS2003

[TechTrend]

I manage a Proxmox 4.4-12 cluster running VMs with WS2012, WS2008, Centos and Debian. Most VMs came from a VMware 6.0 cluster. Previous migrations went smoothly.

This week I migrated an older WS2003 and have not been able to get the console mouse and keyboard to work. The Windows login screen comes up fine, but with symptoms similar to those reported in these no keyboard mouse in console and ps2 keyboard drivers threads. I made sure VMware Tools were removed prior to migration. In VMware the Device Manager on the VM shows a VGA display, PS/2 keyboard and PS/2 mouse (no VMware devices). The VM has been rebooted in Proxmox several times (including safe mode) but symptoms don't change. There is no keyboard and mouse I/O to login. Keyboard is operational prior to loading windows, e.g. BIOS, F8 Windows boot menu and the Windows installer CD for recovery. Sendkey in the Proxmox monitor has no effect. I tried using the USB keyboard/mouse config suggested on this Proxmox for Mac OS X blog, but still got no console I/O.

I am aware that older virtio-win drivers are required since the current virtio-win does not support WS2003 or XP. Yet to configure devices I need a working console keyboard/mouse. The VM has RDP enabled but there is no external network access, even when configuring E1000 for Ethernet (the same used on VMware) .

Any suggestions would be appreciated. Thanks.

 

[pabernethy]

You could try disabling tablet mode for the mouse in the VM options.

 

[TechTrend]

Thanks. Already tried disabling "Use tablet for pointer" in Proxmox and "Enhance pointer precision" in Windows, but still had no keyboard or mouse I/O on the console.

 

[pabernethy]

Is it possible to install drivers from the installer? If so you could install the VirtIO or updated E1000 drivers (see wiki). Then you could log in via RDP to see what's the issue with the mouse/keyboard driver.

 

[TechTrend]

The problem turned out to be that the Windows installation on that WS2003 VM was missing DLLs (hidserv.dll and others). It worked under VMware, but driver updates didn't complete properly after migrating to Proxmox. Since the VM had SP2 applied and that service pack updates most DLLs, I reapplied the service pack to get the missing DLLs before the migration. Afterwards it proceeded normally and the console was functional enough to do the required driver updates. The only remaining problem is that the mouse pointer in the NoVNC console is usually off. Tried changing "Use tablet for pointer" in Proxmox and "Enhance pointer position" in control panel, but none of the alternatives fixed this. Enabled RDP and the alternate SPICE console as a workaround.