Mouse and partition problems after Red Hat 9 install

I had to do a fresh partition and install of Red Hat 9 after a hard drive crash. I formatted several partitions using Red Hat's fdisk. I have an 80GB hard drive broken down as 4GB ext3 linux partition, with several FAT-32 partitions (to be mounted as Samba shares). Altogether I allocated about 40GB of the 80GB capacity. One other thing to note is the Linux partition is a logical partition under the extended partition. It's not the primary partition. I'm using the Grub boot loader. Red Hat is working great, no sign of any problems reading/writing data to any of the partitions. Samba works great too.

I decided I need to resize some of the paritions so I downloaded the latest version of gparted live CD. Tried booting up with it and ran into 2 problems.
(1) After everything is done loading, as soon as I start moving the mouse, the cursor disappears. Furthermore the keyboard doesn't work, so I'm stuck and have to reboot.
(2) Prior to moving the mouse, gparted does examine the hard drive and create a partition map. Unfortunately, it doesn't look anything like the real partition map. Instead of all the partitions I stated above, it only shows a single 8GB partition with a yellow triangle and under filesystem, it says "unknown". Underneath, it says there's ~70GB of free space.

I know I'm supposed to click on the yellow triangle to get more info, but I can't due to problem #1.

The only other clue I have is I tried booting gparted a few different ways and I did notice a message fly by saying ImExPS/2 Generic Explorer Mouse not Recognized. The mouse works fine when I boot Red Hat itself. I'm currently using a 3 button USB wheelmouse with a usb-to-PS/2 adapter plugged into the PS/2 port of the motherboard. I also tried using an older basic 2 button PS/2 mouse. Same problem.

Not to confuse things, but another possible clue. While debugging my hard drive crash, I was booting with a Knoppix Live CD. The mouse worked fine back then. But now that I have Red Hat 9 installed, I tried booting the Knoppix CD today (figuring I could use the included gparted utility) and now that has the same mouse problem as the gparted CD!

It's almost as if after installing Red Hat 9, the mouse works great for Red Hat but won't work for any "live CDs".

I figure I need to get the mouse problem solved in order to see why gparted is reporting the wrong partition map, but ultimately I need to understand why it thinks I have an unknown file system.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

One last thing, I booted a laptop using both the gparted and Knoppix CDs, and they both worked fine (including reporting the correct hard drive partition info), so I know both CDs are good.

Thank you,