At some point in the 1990s when I had a computer running windows 95/98, I got curious about its functions. I had only ever been using the keyboard after the computer finished booting and I wanted to know what happens if you press buttons while it's booting up. That's how I got to see the BIOS for the first time. I showed the outcome of my experiment to my dad, and he rebooted the computer and told me to wait for it to finish booting up before pressing anything. I didn't understand where I had ended up, but I remembered it as that time the computer did something weird because I pressed a button too early.
Many years later I intentionally entered the BIOS to change the date in the computer, and it was easier to find there than in the windows settings. This was to let me keep using a now outdated version of microsoft office (I recommend LibreOffice as a replacement of it). This was on a computer that had both windows ME and XP installed, and it would ask which one you wanted when it was booting up. It asked this after the point where you would press a key to enter the BIOS.
I learned some important things from this. If you're experimenting and the computer does something you've never seen before, go ask someone who knows more. You can enter the BIOS as the computer is booting up. The operating system doesn't start booting up at the exact same time as the computer, it starts after the BIOS becomes available.
I now have a windows 10, and last week the harddrive that the BIOS was set to boot first became faulty. I was stuck in a loop between BSOD and windows automatic repair mode. In automatic repair mode the keyboard was non-functional, so I couldn't do anything except shut down the computer. Rebooting resulted in another BSOD, and then is sent me back to repair mode. Pressing caps lock before it went into repair mode showed that the keyboard was working, only to stop working when the computer tried to start windows. This had me thinking that it was an update that had gone wrong, and that booting the computer in safe mode and doing a system restore could solve it. I grabbed my phone to look up how to do that, and all the instructions said either to go through the windows settings or the automatic repair mode. Some instructions mentioned getting into the BIOS those ways to change some settings. The only problems were that windows settings were completely inaccessible to me and I couldn't do anything in automatic repair mode. When I added "keyboard not working" to my search, the responses became to give up and that there's nothing to do.
I wasn't about to accept that. The instructions had mentioned opening the BIOS, and I knew from my experiment 3 decades earlier that there's a way to do that that doesn't rely on windows. But based on the instructions, it looked like that was becoming lost knowledge. I realized that if I could get the computer to boot from an external drive instead, I might be able to get it working again. So I started experimenting to find the BIOS key, and it took much longer than the time when I accidentally entered the BIOS. After many attempts, I found out that DEL opened it, and there I was able to tell it to not boot from the faulty hard drive.
I'm writing this on my now resurrected computer. It turned out that when my dad had custody of it, he installed a secondary drive that automatically kept backups of everything. So my plan to install Windows 98 on a USB stick and get access to my files and settings that way turned out to not be needed. But I now have a USB for nostalgic DOS games instead.
Seeing the instructions online that there wasn't anything to do if the keyboard wasn't working in automatic repair mode made me decide to write this. There was plenty to do. My computer is completely fine now, but if I had listened to instructions online I could've given up on it. While I'm sure that being able to do things through the windows settings can be convenient, it requires things to work. And most of the time when someone wants to access the BIOS or safe mode, it's because there's something not working. And knowledge about how to do that needs to be more available. We shouldn't be telling people that there's nothing to do the moment when the most convenient fix doesn't work. It's crazy that one experiment 3 decades ago gave me more necessary knowledge on how to solve this than the modern tech forums I could access on my phone. I don't know much about hardware. I couldn't even identify a faulty hard drive based on the ticking sound it was making. But I was able to figure out possible solutions that weren't even mentioned when I look for solutions online. And I had the worst case scenario with the hard drive being faulty. The same BSOD and automatic repair mode loop can happen from many different things, including faulty updates of drives. And I have to imagine that if that was the keyboard drives, it could also render the keyboard non-functional. Or it could've been connected to a faulty USB port. Or just plain old broken. There were still so many possibilities to try when the instructions started saying that there's nothing to do.
I don't have an easy solution. All I have to say is this: If your computer is broken and people are saying to just get a new one because there's nothing to do and you would get a new one in that situation.. there's no harm in tinkering with it to see what happens and if it starts working again. You're not gonna be making it worse by trying. If it's starting, press keys that are listed on the display. And if nothing else, borrow a computer from someone else and download an operating system to a USB and try to boot it that way. The Internet Archive has plenty of options. I picked windows 98 because I also wanted a DOS gaming USB out of the experience, but more modern options may be easier to use.
