Laptop KB issue

[banjoman]

Have a 2 year old laptop. Working fine in XP then one day crashed and required physical removal of power and battery to shutdown.

On restart keyboard and touchpad werent working but windows booted. Plugged in USB mouse no joy. Windows went through normal boot routine and would react to any storage device plugged in USB just not HID. Left it overnight

Now it has trouble getting past the bios. One is it seems to hang at memory test but only occasionally, so checked RAM and went back to a brand new single stick rather than 2.

Other problem is it warns CMOS defaults loaded and asks me to press F1 setup / F2 load defaults and continue. And the keyboard doesnt work. So tried a different keyboard and still same.

So removed CMOS battery and left a while...no effect. Removed practically everything including HD and DVD no effect. Tried external keyboard, but no PS2 ports only USB and by that stage of the strap it isnt loading the USB support. Tried all variations of memory,checked CPU and heatsink, cleaned fans, removed and replaced keyboard, everything

And then a weird thing. I noticed that if I held INS during boot I get extended BIOS information (its AMI) and the screen showed "INS Pressed". So it was accepting keyboard input, but never enough to fill the buffer. Have since tried 3 solid days of holding keys down during boot, alternate pressing all sorts and to date have managed to get into windows twice, both times without kb/mouse (although when in there the wireless hotkey works fine as does the hardware shortcut buttons)

So techie guys what do we think ? I have a BIOS flash here ready to go which resolves this exact issue (from ECS website) but cant get past the BIOS F2 to continue. Emailed board manufacturer but still no reply. Checked Ebay for replacement board but they are few and far between. Just need to be able to press F2 as the BIOS flash is on bootable USB with autoexec.bat set to run the flash without requiring keypresses. But how do I get past F2 (no jumpers on board BTW)