I found a comport test utility that comes with cutemouse. It would not detect any of the comport settings I set in the bios. So in the end I founded a isa io card with serial ports and now got the mouse working.

perhaps the mouse chipset is faulty on my board

Make sure the serial cables are the right types. There was two types of serial port headers and no way of finding out which is which visually. It's possible both cables you tried as the wrong type and that your mobo uses the other type.

Correct. Two types, what determines this is at 9 pin connector. Unscrew from bracket and pull back the black hood away from 9 pin connector and will give you answer. If you find one that is different use that instead.

I think the same. Also, you can check your serial/parallel ports easily by using, say, CheckIt! v3 and CheckIt! v4.
With and without a loop adapter. Without anything connected, it will write to/read from the chips internally and display the results on screen.

Still no. There are 2 types of wirings for internal serial port cables that terminates in flat ribbon of female 10 pins. One is sequence wired, and other one staggered.

Cheers,

good to know, if I wasn't lucky to have found a isa io card I would probably need to hack my cable up (I only have 2)

I used comtest.com from cutemouse package and for both the onboard com ports it showed no signal, however for my io card it showed as 16555a fifo or something similar. But I am not sure if it detects the com ports on the io card because it has its own cable already plugged in with correct pins and my motherboard does not.

Learned something new today about the com port plugs not being stardard

thanx all