Impossible to get into Bios setup

Happy New year to all

I encountered something special the other day, when trying to clean a friend of mine's machine which wouldn't start anymore.

I was very confident when I arived with my set of cdroms equipped with various cleaning tools and so on, for instance BartPe and UBCD4W.

To my great (bad) surprise, the pc could only boot 1from floppy (thank God there was one) and 2HDD (which was bugged).

I said to myself no problem, let's get into the Bios/CMOS setup and change the startup sequence and add cd-drive and dvd-drive to the sequence.

I never could get into the setup. I tried F1, F2, F3, F5, F8, del, esc, you name it.

I thought there was maybe a problem of some sort with the keyboard, so I changed and replaced it. To no avail.

Any idea what to do in such a rare case?

 

BTW, I also tried ctrl-alt-s, shift-f9, shift-f10.

No result.

Thanks for advices and opinions

 

Hi BeatsMe,

Booting with the keyboard disconnected should *force* a BIOS entry. Try it.


GF

 

hi... I'll try that.

Thank you very much

Cheers

 

Does the BIOS have a screen that tells you to press a specified key on the keyboard to enter BIOS Setup?
And booting with the keyboard disconnected? What does it do? Will it make the BIOS show some POST error or message that says no keyboard detected. It won't force a BIOS entry or make the computer enter the BIOS setup screen! You MUST press some key in order to enter the BIOS!

Does the computer's documentation, if any, give any guides on how to enter the BIOS? Most computers have a user's guide at the very least that has instructions on how to enter the BIOS and configure it. When attempting to press the keys to enter the BIOS, did you press it when the BIOS screen appears or did you miss it by a few secs?

 

Hello...

Yes, the screen tells me for two seconds that in order to enter I should press del. But when I do, nothing happens, whichever keyboard I try with. Can't figure out why.

 

Hi BeatsMe,

DEL key means it must be an AMI or Award BIOS.

Keep tapping the DEL key as soon as you see the display at the botton of the screen.

-- Tom

 

Hi... Well, I did that about thirty times, sometimes keeping my finger on it, sometimes hitting several times.... no success.

 

Only time I saw this before was when either the keyboard port was bad on the mobo OR the computer was a Compaq. The early Compaqs used the first 8 meg of the hard drive as the bios. I had to go to their site and get a floppy to replace it. I don't think anybody still uses that and Compaq is owned by HP now.
I usualy go to the manufacture site and get a current BIOS flash and if it is a home made computer, I look up the mobo manufature and go from there.
Tell us a bit more about this computer.

 

"Tell us a bit more about this computer."

Come, come now controler .... no one ever think's of that!
Please BeatsMe, do tell.


GF

 

Give us the system specs of the computer, also download BIOS Agent from this site:
http://www.unicore.com/biosagent/index.cfm



If possible, try to update the BIOS.