Dead mouse (touchpad & external) ~1hr after hard drive replacement on laptop

[mousetrapped]

Dead mouse (touchpad & external) ~1hr after hard drive replacement on laptop


My touchpad is inoperative. 

I have a Gateway T-6345u laptop with Intel Pentium Dual T3400 @ 2.16GHz; Vista 32 bit Home Premium.

The old hard drive died and I just replaced it.  Both were Seagate SATA.  I went from 250 GB to 500GB and cloned a full image of the old drive to the new using Seagate Disk Wizard, then used Disk Mgr to expand the primary partition to utilize the additional space.

The laptop worked OK for about an hour. When I was trying to reinstall Kaspersky Internet Security, however, and restarted the machine, the mouse had frozen and will no longer work. Ditto for any USB external mouse, of which I have 2. I tried them both.  Since then ...24 hrs ago...I have only keyboard control.

Device Mgr now shows any and all mice as "Windows cannot load the driver...may be corrupted or missing."

I've deleted and reinstalled a fresh Synaptics driver for the touchpad, but the same error message recurs.  It shows in Dev Mgr as "Synaptics PS/2 Port Pointing Device" and NOT "Synaptics PS/2 Port Touchpad"
I also tried:

-Fn F6 or F7 - they don't toggle the touchscreen on/off on this particular model.
-booting into safe mode - no change.
-system restore - was turned off due to problem on old drive; so, no restore points exist.
-ran Ccleaner - no change.

I don't want to do a fresh instal both because of the number of programs installed and because the Disk Wizard clone image is the best backup I have.

I presume I have a hardware conflict but have no idea how to proceed. Please help if you can.

[Ironman]

try running Driver Pack Solution, which is a automated program and let it update all your drivers.
http://drp.su/download.htm

or you can download just the drivers specific to your laptop and manually install them
http://drp.su/drivers/notebooks/?v=Gateway&m=T-6345u&id=9607&l=en

After you do that tell us if the problem still persists

[Geek-9pm]

What reason is there to think it is a software issue?
You can download a free minimal operating system that will find the mouse if it is working.
Here are three such links:
http://www.pendrivelinux.com/category/new-usb-linux-tutorials/
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Installation/FromUSBStick
http://puppylinux.com/flash-puppy.htm

Of course these alternative OS have nothing to do with Windows. That is why you use them to check and see if the hardware can be found by an independent operating System. If Puppy Linux or one of the others can not find your mouse, your mouse interface has gone away. New software  will not bring it back to life.

After years of experience, I have never hears of a hard drive clone losing the drivers for the mouse. It is near impossible. Random errors in sector translation, if that is what happened, would not selectively zap the mouse software and nothing else. IMHO.

The most lonely thing is your motherboard is failing and the drive failure was not the only thing that went bad.