enter key not working

heres a problem for u
my sister gave me her laptop, amilo m7400, to see if i could sort it for her, it is constantly restarting
blue screen is too brief to view the fault,
i tried to restart in safe, but the enter key is not working
neither is the down arrow or the f2 key
so i cant select safe mode to start it up
there doesnt look to be any liquid damage to the keyboard and although one of the keys are missing
what do i do?
i suspect its the keyboard itself at fault here but i dont know for sure, and £30+ is a lot of money for something that could be fine already
3 options as far as im aware
1. buy a new keyboard and hope its a hardware issue
2. find a substitute enter key
3. plug a usb keyboard into it to run safe mode
now i dont have a usb keyboard here so is it worth me looking round to find one or am i wasting my time
im wondering if the system will recognise the usb keyboard from bios
my main question id love to know is
is there any other substitute for the enter key
if there is i can finally get round to sorting the real problems out
if anyone can help it would be much appreciated
thanx carl

 

well ive made some progress thanx to major attitude
ive plugged a usb keyboard into it and its proved the keyboard to be faulty
right, now with the problem
i f8'ed it and disabled reboot on error
now i can read the blue screen, it says
unmountable boot volume (although it takes a whole page to tell me)
does this mean a complete install or is it just something wrong which can be sorted
if anyone can help then please advise me
thanx
carl

blue scvreen says:

unmountable_boot_volume
then theres a load of standard blue screen stuff and at the bottom theres this bit:

*** STOP: 0x000ED (0x812A9738,0xC0000006,Ox00000000,0x00000000)

 

ive found this and pursuing it for now
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/297185
carl

 

yeah i restarted and ran system re overy and chkdsk /r and it cured my blue screen, now i found a load of viruses on the thing
virtumonde + more

im gonna follow the vundo thing on here and if i have any problems ill be back in mal
cheers
carl