Question Any thoughts or experiences with usb keyboard not active during bios?

Apr 24, 2019
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I sometimes troubleshoot family and friends PC's.I just finished a frustrating , hair pulling, battle with my mother in law's PC.They had some .sys files that had become corrupted somehow.Anyway, I thought I would just save her personal pictures and files and recover it or do a fresh install of Windows 10 Microsoft without the OEM bloatware.Her keyboard is usb, it is not active before the bios hands off to Windows.So I went round and round trying to recover or reinstall.All that happens in bios, and you must "hit any key to continue" with the install media or "select your keyboard layout" to recover, no keyboard makes that impossible.I was able to workaround by physically removing their hard drive and putting it another we have here to reinstall Windows 10 that had a ps2 connector, removing it from that computer at the install completion reboot and putting it back in their PC to install Windows drivers for their hardware.In spite of all this their usb only PC is still not activating the keyboard until Windows boots.Anyone have experience fixing this, is there any software that could access bios from within Windows? Are there settings in bios that might allow the bios to see this usb keyboard? It is an H.Packard PC.
 
Apr 24, 2019
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full system spec?
Almost embarrassed to say.It is an older PC, as my inlaws are in their late 70's only use it to get online.I have it ready to go back home so the best I can do quickly, is post HP's page on it.Is that sufficient? If not I will hook it back up and access specs there.Looking at the sticker on side I see it is AMD Athlon II 640, 4gb DDR3, Radeon PC. I also recall that it is a Alvorix motherboard running bios version 6.06 , also OEM was Windows 7 of course. https://support.hp.com/us-en/produc...p-pc-series/5035348/model/5049551?sku=BV545AA
 
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Apr 24, 2019
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Thank you for responding, I figured it out.Seems like HP has an issue that only certain keyboards work.Switched another and it's fine now.All that, trying to overcome their system problems, because the keyboard I was using and this PC didn't sync well.
 
I have had this happen with a family PC...my Dad's system, as a matter of fact.

My resolution in that case was to dig out an old PS/2 keyboard, and plug it into the keyboard connector...BIOS cooperated after that.

I later discovered that the USB connector, closest to the PS/2 port, and lowest in the stack (closest to the actual motherboard plane) also works to get into BIOS configuration and move about.

Not certain if this applies in your situation, but it is worth trying should you encounter the problem in the future.