BIOS Residing Boot Protection

[IRL337]

Hi guys, ok, get this.  My friend/coworker brought me 2 laptops that he, well, \"aquired\".   He brought them to me because i am in the IT department here at work and was hoping i could get them to boot to desktop.

Problem:  *Wont boot to desktop.
               *Stops on a command line screen  with the   following 3 options:  1)boot on line  2)boot off line 3) Neither
               *when you press a keystroke... 4 or 5 characters are actually entered  example:  if i depress the \"3\" key, \"e$cfr\" is what actually gets inputted into the command line.

Suspect:  I believe the previous owners of the pc ran some sort of protection program on the laptop that starts when the bios is loaded that not only rearranges the layout of the keyboard randomly, but also inputs multiple characters per each keystroke.

Ive tried using a boot disk and i can get to a command promt, but when i try to type in the command prompt, 5 random characters are entered per keystoke, barring me from typing successful format/fdisk commands.

The pc is running win 98.
 

thx

[IRL337]

the clock hit 5 when i was typing above so ill continue more of it here.

so i also took out the cmos battery hoping it would lose any bios settings back to default without that protection program running... i think the last time i had to remove a battery was about 4 years ago or so and i forgot that removing the bios/mainboard battery only loses the time/date settings and WONT restore bios defaults. so that didnt work.....

I also put in a W2k CD hoping i could format/reinstall the OS from the w2k cd.... (bypassing the whole dos---->win98 boot sequence)  but still no luck... after the W2K setup screens it drops back to a black DOS command prompt with a message that says something to the effect of \"you must exit the recovery program and restart.  To exit, type EXIT\"  so when i go to type \"Exit\", the problem comes back up with getting 5 random character typed per each single keystroke i make.... so

it looks something like this:

C:

then i type the letter E (to start spelling out \"exit\") and this is displayed

C:#edcv

anyways theres some hopefully helpful info

[rdc]

Must be some scrambled (encrypted) thing , because EDCV has something to do with law cases (search with google).
or short for extremely deadly contagious  virus ;-) .
Perhaps if you could find out where they come from , you could also find out what\'s wrong with them , could be bad memory . could a lot of things .

[Anonymous]

I see a pattern in the \"random characters.\" Look at #edc on the keyboard. Last time that happened to me I had cleaned my keyboard and put it together and it was still a little wet. It doesn\'t take much moisture to short the traces on the membrane in the keyboard.   Good luck