came home from the MUG with a few ideas offered up by Bill and Brian...using an usb keyboard I was able to get into the BIOS and sure enough the FASTBOOT mode was on...so now I could get in and change the sequence though the resident keyboard symptoms remain(about 8 keys work)...I was able to install LMINT on a couple of 2.5" hdds for future use...(yes brian that hdd seems unusable, though others that produced the sound are now happy to be in action???)
I had presented another challenge, that my HP tower was failing to boot and was giving a 4 beep code...I removed the cmos battery and after replacing the beeps were gone but no sytem was detected on one of the hdds but it booted up LMINT on the other drive,just have to reset the time.
so thanks for all the suggestions, dougal
Glad you figured it out but keyboard symptoms? Could you elaborate on that? Are you saying that only eight keys work?
quick look and its:
bn/kjhgfdawp[\ and on the neumeric section;673*/
also the backspace,shift,enter
Weird - definitely sounds like a hardware issue. Could be they keyboard itself, like somebody spilled coffee on it or the connector has popped out partway maybe. Could happen if it was dropped, I suppose.
Open it up and disconnect the keyboard, us a usb keyboard in the interim, you can always rinse out the original and then let it dry for a few days (week even) and try it again. Otherwise you have a spare display / portable server with battery backup as long as you get networking setup and SSH running :)