According to pinouts.ru a serial mouse needs a positive voltage on pin 7, which gets toggled to reset the mouse, something the driver would be doing when it tries to detect the mouse. So if you have a multimeter and you can measure the voltage on pin 7, try to load the mouse and see if you get a positive reading appearing on it for a moment. I am not sure how long the voltage remains on for, however it should be enough to see the meter do *something*. If you get nothing then there's a good chance the connector uses the other kind of wiring.

Another test you can do is to connect pins 2 and 3 together, which creates a loopback interface. If you fire up a terminal emulator like Telix and connect to your serial port, then with local-echo switched on, you should see each letter you type appear twice, as in "hheelloooo". If this happens then pins 2 and 3 are correct, if you only see one letter "hello" then the port wiring is wrong.

I can't see it in your photo but the other connectors have both a 1 and a 2 next to the pins to tell you which order they are in. Is there a "2" on the serial ports as well? This would tell you what kind of wiring arrangement it uses.

I presume you have disconnected your mouse when you are testing the floppy controller, in case it's short-circuiting something due to the wrong pin assignment?

I have one VLB IO card where the Prime2C chip died suddenly one day, resulting in no floppy, COM, LPT and IDE operation. VLB IDE still works so I am just using an ISA IO card next to the VLB one.

Sounds like what happens when cards get damaged by static electricity from improper handling (not even by you but a previous owner). The damage accumulates gradually until all of a sudden one day for some reason it's too much and it will just die.

Tiido wrote:

I have one VLB IO card where the Prime2C chip died suddenly one day, resulting in no floppy, COM, LPT and IDE operation. VLB IDE still works so I am just using an ISA IO card next to the VLB one.

Indeed the IDE still works. It was sold as tested and working but who knows.
Did you disable things on both of the cards to get them working together? Tried it yesterday but the machine acted weird. Perhaps of irq conflicts?

@Malvineous: I will provide a better picture asap. No multimeter yet. Quite a shame...
When the components were outside the case it worked fine,only after when I connected a serial header it started.

Yeah, I removed the IRQ jumpers and also set all the ISA side things to disabled. I think mine also stopped working after some sort of serial header related thing, that is when I discovered there are two different pinouts. Sadly the card never worked afterwards...
EDIT: Maybe one/some of the RS232 transceviers are damaged and put the prime2C into in intermediate state... I'll have to experiment with removal of them and see if anything comes back to life.

I must point out that the old serial brackets have a different pinout than the new ones, meaning a modern serial bracket won't work - maybe that's the case here?

Is there a way to figure out which one touch user with no pro equipment 😀?
I was hoping that one of the 4 would work....
As stated before,I got some more but they got 1 hole plugged up so bot usable.

There is no 2 on the header like with the IDE socket.

You really need to be able to measure voltages to know which pins do what. You can buy multimeters very cheaply, some are $5 or under, there's really no excuse not to have one! Especially when you're dealing with old hardware that has no documentation.

You can unscrew the hex nuts on the DB9 port and slide off the plastic shell on the back. If you compare the wiring to some photos (such as the fine ones I took and put on the Vogonswiki) then you might be able to work out what type of wiring arrangement they all are.

I'm at home this week so buying a multimeter is on my list 😀

As for now, I used the same method as Tiido. I use the VLB for my IDE channel and an ISA IO for all the rest. This works so ATM I'm not gonna fiddle with it again and put even more time in it.
Will buy a multimeter though 😀