My daughter's Compaq Presario laptop (2590US) - standard issue with Windows XP. She brought it home from college a couple of weeks ago stating it doesn't work. Well, turns out that it is very "messed up". It will not boot at all from the hard drive, when I try to boot from the WinXP install CD, none of the keys on the keyboard will work - no response at all (except for the Fx key to quit the install). I need the enter-key to get through the re-install of WinXP but that key does not work either during the install process. When I try to use an older (circa Win98) Norton "rescue CD" the keys generate strange characters (e.g. ^B for b, <backspace> for h, various "wingdings" for about half the other letters, etc.), so I can not enter any DOS type of commands. The strange part of this though, when I go into the SETUP during POST, all of the keys on the keyboard work just fine.

I'm thinking that she got into something very nasty, but I am at a loss as to how to go about fixing it without a functional keyboard capability (I also have tried using an external PS/2 keyboards with the same results). I tried to get it to boot from a USB flash drive with the basic Win98 O/S, but it would not boot from the USB flash drive (I used the HP USB storage drive tool to format the flash drive as bootable, but "no go"). I was thinking if I could re-flash the BIOS, that might "cure" the basic problem with keyboard letter "mapping", but without a "working" keyboard, I can't even use the DOS commands, let alone do anything else.

Anyway .... I sure could use some suggestions as to how to go about solving this. Thanks

This post has been edited by KenPC: Aug 27 2008, 10:18 PM