How to restore hardware drivers...

Hi guys, I got to the office today and started working on one of my server machines to discover that the PS/2 keyboard and mouse aren't working. After fumbling with the hardware connections at the back of the server for awhile, I plug in a USB2 mouse. Here I am able to navigate to the device manager and discover that my PS/2 drivers are corrupted and/or non-functioning. After hours of trying various solutions from updating the drivers and restarting (multiple tries), to upgrading from Windows 2000 to Windows XP (hoping the drivers get refreshed that way), I still cannot get my PS/2 keyboard and mouse to work.

My question is, is there a way, besides wiping out the hard drive and reinstalling everything, to revert to a previous state for ALL drivers on my computer? Keep in mind that if we are talking about physically copying the driver files to the windows/system32/drivers folder, that potentially conflicts could occur because most of those drivers are in use even in safe mode.

Any sensible input would be helpful...as well as fixes from people who've had this sort of driver corruption issue with Win2000/XP before.

 

how did you determine that the drivers were corrupted? it seems that if the hardware doesn't work on multiple instances of an OS, including a fresh install, it's not a software issue.

EDIT: my bad. just noticed that you did an upgrade. still, are you sure the hardware works?

 

We have multiple servers, and I can swap the PS/2 keyboards or mice to other servers and determine that they work correctly. So it's not the hardware.

 

so, you're saying you've done this and determined it's not a hardware issue?

 

No, it's not a hardware issue. Also, I can access the BIOS screen fine on startup, it just goes to hell once I go into Windows with the corrupted drivers. Also, I think the registry entries for keyboard/mouse may be corrupted too---anyone have any experience with that?

 

Ok I found out what it was. Someone (me) performed an unattended installation of Symantec's PCAnywhere that went horribly horribly wrong. Without getting into too much detail, it modified some of the drivers or registry entries to my PS/2 devices to prepare it for remote desktopping and the like, only to stop unexpectedly and exit the silent install without actually finishing the modifications.

The lesson learned? Don't be stupiiiiiid. Or try really really hard not to be anyway...