So, I've had bad luck with the PS/2 mouse connections on a couple of my boards now and I'm starting to feel rather defeated about it. Hoping you all can help.

Most recently, I grabbed an adapter for the pin header on a recently acquired PCChips M549 board, and neither of my mice will be detected. It's a generic adapter, so I had to change the pin locations to match the header. Unfortunately I'm an impatient idiot and I got the wiring wrong the first time, and I didn't realize it until I plugged in a mouse and I had problems with the keyboard not responding. And now after setting the pins correctly, the keyboard is fine, but CTMOUSE doesn't detect anything in DOS. At the very least, I can say for sure that I only plugged/unplugged anything while the computer was off.

But now I'm kicking myself because I should have been smarter than that, and now I don't know if my initial mistake could have caused the problem I'm seeing, or if it was already an issue.

Based on a visual inspection, I don't see any obviously damaged components around the header and I don't see any fuses at all on the board. Also, I've checked the voltage pin on the header and it seems to be putting out a steady 5V. But those are really the only things I know to look for.

Anyone have any tips for what else I should check? I can't seem to find any good examples of how to fully diagnose this sort of problem.