Wednesday, November 12, 2008

Windows 2008 DataCenter Mouse Blues

Working with the Windows 2008 Datacenter version, I had to create a couple of Virtual machines. Once I remote into that server, and created the virtual machines, I've found out that connecting to those VM while using Remote Desktop causes the VM machine to not recognize the mouse.!

I keep getting this annoying dialog box: Mouse not captured in Remote Desktop session.

Of course the content help wasn't helpul at all:

The mouse is available in a Remote Desktop session when integration services are installed in the guest operating system. For more information, search on 'integration services' in Help.

image

if you look at the bottom of the Virtual Machine Connection screen you see this

image

I have tried removing the virtual machine additions, adding the Hyper-V Integration Services, etc, etc.  It is still did not work. I found a blog post from Maarten van Stam that talks about making the VM look at the HAL by adding an extra CPU to the VM.  At this point, I'm very aggravated that I don't have a mouse and keep having to use TABS and SHIFT-F10 keys all over, so I give it a try.

After adding an extra CPU, rebooted the VM, and now my mouse works.!  WTF?  I remove the extra CPU from the VM, and confirmed that in fact the mouse still works.

One more thing, you can get your mouse working if you install the Hyper-V Management Tools on your Windows Vista, here is the MSDN article that talks about it http://support.microsoft.com/kb/952627.

1 comment:

Altrics hosting said...

Well, that really it is.. I also rebooted the server just to make the other tools working. Maybe it works like you are also adding another input device on your system.

Datacenter