No setup utility Toshiba w/Insyde

Recommended by Wim's BIOS...

I can't get into the BIOS setup utility using F2. I've tried holding it down and pressing it briefly. I've also tried pressing it while holding down the FN key. If I wait a couple seconds after the Toshiba screen comes up and then tap F2 I will get the Windows Boot Manager (not the BIOS). If I do either of the other two things the Toshiba screen freezes and after a few minutes it times out and the machine shuts down. If I don't touch any keys it goes on to try to boot Vista.

I've also tried esc, del, and the other function keys. Almost all of them get me to the Windows Boot Manager either by tapping or holding down. The F2 key is unusual in that I can hold it down forever without the keyboard loading up and beeping, but it still responds if I just tap it. (It just goes to the wrong place)

The instructions on the screen say F2 for setup utility and F12 for Boot Manager. Sometimes F12 causes a freeze and then shutdown.

I've also tried TSETUP from command prompt C:\ and C:\TOSHIBA\ and it does not recognize the command. (This was suggested in another post on this forum.)

Any ideas what's wrong? Any other ways to get to the setup utility?

Thanks!

Update: I've ruled out a keyboard problem. "F2" is a DOS command. When you hit F2 at the command prompt a window appears that asks "Enter char to copy to:" If your previous DOS command was "cd windows\system32" and you hit F2 and then "3" you will get "cd windows\system".

The Toshiba performs this exactly like my Dell.

That's settled. Now why won't the BIOS listen? An easy answer is malware, but I think it is too easy.

I wonder if there is a way to do a BIOS dump to a file.

[edwin]

What is the model, how old is the laptop, has it been behaving badly in another way before it started doing this, what have you tried so far to correct the original problem?

It is a Toshiba Satellite L305. It has an AMD64 running 32 bit Vista. It is not mine. I'm trying to fix it for somone. About a year ago he connected on-line to someone in India or further east to have his machine "tuned up" or "sped up" or something. He can't remember who it was. He was running with a nearly full hard drive.

My initial guess was that he lost battery power during a Windows update which corrupted his Vista. The only thing I have done is transferred some of his movies via flash drive to free up some space. He has about 20Gb free now.

Vista can't/won't load network drivers, ATI graphics drivers, and other luxuries. I'm lucky I can use the USB!

Now I'm wondering if the BIOS may be part of the problem or even the main problem.

[edwin]

Put in the Toshiba recovery CD/DVD and completely reinstall windows. That is not the bios that is shot, it is the windows install that has been infected by a trojan...

I took it over to the Geek Squad last night and asked them what they would charge to get into my BIOS. She said no charge so I said go ahead. She powered up and instantly started tapping the F2. It did what it does when I do that: freezes on the Toshiba screen. She said right away that I had a bad CMOS battery. I asked, "are you sure? I can run a lot of things as it is." She was sure. I'm sure she's seen a lot. Maybe she'd seen it before.

I want to confirm that you still can have the DVD drive working, USB ports working, etc. with a bad CMOS battery before I take the thing apart.

[edwin]

Yes that can happen, and yes it would mean you have trouble getting into the bios, and windows is having trouble to start, because it cannot read the time/date + what hardware is in the machine.

(sorry for the long line)

I took the thing apart last night. It has a soldered-in CMOS battery. With the mother board removed and disconnected, the battery voltage is 3.3V. Not ony that but the thing has been keeping accurate time. (One early sign of a weak CMOS battery is inaccurate time-keeping.) I think the battery is fine.

It uses an AMD 64-bit mp.

I found a PDF of the original user's manual and it says to enter/edit the BIOS from Windows. It never mentions F2 even though the first screen says to use F2 after power-up. I'm sure that is not the only way to get in. I did find Bootpriority.exe, but it needs Toshiba common modules which I have not installed yet.

I do not suspect the battery, but I still think the BIOS might be jazzed up. Even with an empty hard drive and no operating system the BIOS should still be accessible. There's a thought: I can see what happens if I power up with the HDD removed.

I went ahead and booted with no hard drive and, to make a long story short, it found my bootable Linux USB stick.

It first tried twice to find a network drive to boot from before giving up and finding the USB. Now I am hoping to find a BIOS viewer/editor that I can run from my Debian LDXE desktop. Any ideas?

PS: Tsetup is supposedly available at the Toshiba website so I'm going to look for that. It is a downloadable DOS program.

I found tsetup.exe at support.toshiba.com, downloaded it, and copied it to the root of c:\. When I try to run it from the prompt it says, The system cannot find the file C:\tsetup.exe." When I do the same thing on my Dell it says that the program tried to perform an illegal operation and asks if I want to ignore or close.

I seems like I'm being deliberately blocked from BIOS access and there might be a reason why. The Toshiba site warns that some notebooks only allow BIOS access via Windows which could automatically provide password protection for the BIOS settings. I can get to the command prompt without a password so perhaps that backdoor has been bricked over.