Hi, everyone. Been lurking here for a while. Happy to finally make an account.

(Sorry for the long post. Thought it would be better to be detailed. Sorry also for the possible bad english.)

Recently i got inspired to take my Libretto out of the box and power it up again. I spent some time getting it's old hdd to cooperate (at until i can afford an flash media adapter), but after some struggle, got it working with Win98 SE.

As i was fishing up setup, i decided to try a game. As i as playing, i noticed that the ctrl key seemed to not be responding very well. As earlier i had disconnected the keyboard to try to put a new cmos battery on the notebook (it work, but didn't fit the case, so i took it out), i thought that maybe the cable was i little out of place, so i lifted the keyboard up and gave it a little wiggle, to try and correct. After that, all seemed fine, so i continued setting the last things up.

After a reboot to install the last driver, i noticed that, while the ctrl key was working, now the up arrow key had stopped. I got worried, shut down the notebook and reinserted the cable again.

When i turned it on, i saw the "Ready for BIOS update" screen, asking for me to put a diskette with the BIOS update and press a key. I thought that was strange, but after some reboots, the screen got away and i could boot to Windows again.

There, i noticed that more keys stopped working. 9, O , L , . , Fn (all from the same column) plus the Up weren't registering. I got really worried, shut it down again and tried to take out the keyboard again clean it and the connector with a little brush and put it in again.

But this time, try as i might, i couldn't get out of the "Ready for BIOS update" screen, it comes before the boot of the PC. Reading this old support Toshiba support page, https://support.dynabook.com/support/viewCont … ontentId=691202 , i tried a few things, but disconnecting external devices (like the pcmcia floppy drive and dock) and taking out the extra RAM stick didn't work. I don't have a PS2 keyboard to test.

While i don't have a disk with the bios update, every time you press a key in this screen with a floppy in the drive, the drive gives a response, trying to find the BIOS, i suppose. With that, i could test all the keys in the keyboard. I discovered that, besides the ones i said already (9 O L FN Up) the Windows key, Pause, PrintScreen and, mostly important in my case, the F12 key are not responding. Via the support page, F12 seems to be one of the keys that request the update. So i'm thinking that maybe, instead of not working, those keys are somehow stuck down?

Unfortunately, i can't try the most obvious thing to do to at least get past this screen: doing the BIOS update. Besides the Libretto, i don't have another computer with a floppy drive. And i can't get the bios files on a disk without it booting up.

By now i've tried disconnecting and reconnecting the cable a lot of times (in some of those, i think some of the problematic keys even started working, some except the F12...), tried to clean it's connector and moving the cable a little, tried to boot the Libretto with and without it's dock, tried a generic USB keyboard plugged on a random PS2 adapter that i found around here. Nothing. Even tried to boot up the notebook without the keyboard attached, but it didn't worked either. That got me thinking if there is a possibility that the problem may be on the connector or motherboard itself.

Is there something else i can do? At least to pinpoint the problem? I got scared of trying to fiddle with the keyboard too much and getting the situation worse. Can it be something reversible? Where i live it would be almost impossible to find a new keyboard, or even a Libretto in general, even more so at a price that i could afford. (Already got super lucky when i found mine some time ago.)

Sorry again for the long post. I would be very grateful for any help.