Mouse and USB drive issues

Greetings, everyone.

I recently picked up a new USB mouse that functions perfectly on its own. However, I've run into a bit of a headache: the moment I plug in a USB flash drive, the mouse completely stops responding. Unplugging the drive doesn't seem to fix anything; the only way to get things moving again is a full system restart. Does anyone know if there's a remedy for this, or am I just out of luck?🤷

What kind of setup are you running? Have you tried plugging the mouse and the stick into some different USB ports yet?

Casey Long2 said:What are the specs? Have you tried plugging the mouse and the thumb drive into different USB ports?

Alright, so this bucket is about six years old now. I'm running an "ASUS A7V" motherboard paired with an "Intel Pentium 4, 2000 MHz (15 x 133) 2400+" processor and 1 GB of RAM. The case has two front-facing ports and four on the back, and frankly, I've exhausted every possible combination. The mouse works perfectly fine in any port—until the moment I plug in the thumb drive (in any port at all).🤷

Is this happening just with that mouse and joystick, or does it affect everything you plug in?

It’s possible your USB drivers have gotten a bit scrambled and are acting up. Personally, I think the easiest way to troubleshoot this would be to grab any kind of Ubuntu Live CD and boot from it—just to see if the issue persists there. To me, that feels like the most straightforward way to figure out whether we're looking at a hardware failure or just a glitch within macOS 😉
(and honestly, don't let the idea of Linux scare you off—live distributions won't touch your hard drive, so it's pretty much impossible to mess anything up 😉 ))

Casey Long2 said:Is this just happening with that specific mouse and thumb drive, or does it happen with anything else you plug in?

The issue is that this particular mouse won't work with any of my three USB sticks, yet all three sticks function perfectly fine when I use a different (somewhat glitchy PS2) mouse.🤷

Casey Long2 said:... In my opinion, the easiest path would be to grab a live distribution and boot from it to see if the problem persists there. It's probably the most practical way to determine whether we're looking at a hardware failure or a software issue within macOS...

That’s actually a brilliant suggestion that completely escaped me. I have an Ubuntu Live CD that I’ve been playing around with recently (it’s quite impressive, actually), so I'll give that a shot. Thanks.👍

That sounds like a solid plan—go ahead and boot it up so you can start testing things out 😉