[Ham-Computers] App's that don't use a USB mouse - what should I do?

[Jim Hill]

I was using Seagate Sea Tools, an application that comes with new 
Seagate drives to set up a new hard drive.  The CD contains other 
useful utilities, zero fill to overwrite contents of the drive so you 
can start with a clean slate, transfer contents of one drive to 
another, etc. However, it doesn't support a USB mouse, so I used my 
old mouse with the circular connector.  That's fine with this 
computer, but what do you do when using a new computer which no 
longer has a serial, parallel, and mouse ports?

Maybe updated install app's are available, but I bought a new Western 
Digital drive a few months ago.  The Data Lifeguard disk (equivalent 
to the Sea Tools disk) didn't seem to be updated.  I didn't check the 
USB mouse function, but Data Lifeguard still had the old max drive 
size limitation of about 120 GB, and I had to use Partition Magic to 
access the remainder of the drive.  Maybe the keyboard can be used, 
but I was only partially successful with the arrow keys, alt-this, 
alt-that and Enter.

By the  way, if you are buying a new drive, think about the install 
application.  Drives from Newegg and many other on-line stores only 
sell the OEM drive, which don't include the install disk.  The 
install disk may be available online, but check first - and be sure 
you can end up with suitable bootable media.  Even though the screens 
and contents often seem very similar, you often can't use the install 
disk from one vendor with another vendor's drive.

Jim