Do I understand it right that the PS/2 Keyboard you have works in other PCs, but not in the one that you want to format?
Are the other keyboards you mentioned, the ones that you didn't say what type they were, also PS/2 keyboards?
Have you tried any USB keyboards?
Regardless of the answer to those questions, I will tell you that there is nothing magical about getting a keyboard to recognize. You don't really configure a computer to allow you to use a keyboard in terms of the boot process. There are drivers that allow you to use the fancy buttons and switches, but those only apply in Windows.
During the boot process, either a keyboard is going to be recognized or it isn't. There isn't going to be much you can do to change that.
Most of the time, your best bet is going to be to try a different keyboard. I realize you already did that, but the more the merrier. If you can borrow more keyboards from somewhere feel free to try those too.
If you have tried a couple different PS/2s and a couple different USB keyboards and none of them worked, you might want to look at the possibility of just not formatting the PC. Scrapping it might be on the table if it is useless without it being formatted.
There isn't going to be much else you can try other than resetting the BIOS that might cause these keyboards to work and I must tell you that while this process is not hard it might leave you with more problems than you have now.
The power cord will need to be unplugged while you are doing this, as usual for any time you are messing around inside of a PC.
If you understand this and you still want to go ahead with trying it, all you have to do is open the computer up and take out the battery. It is a regular CR 2032 watch battery about the size of a quarter and should be pretty near to the center of the motherboard. Probably between the processor and the video card/PCI slots.
If you take that out of the PC and leave it out for 30 min, then put it back in, the BIOS will be reset to its original settings and the keyboards... might... begin working. The possibility is greater than 0%, but it isn't super large.
If you do that, one of the most likely problems that you might experience is getting a no boot device found error or something similar. This happens often when BIOSs are reset, because usually a BIOS reset changes the instruction set used by a hard drive to IDE after a BIOS reset.
If it was originally using AHCI, SATA, SCSI, or some other instructions and it changes to IDE then the hard drive won't be recognized. To fix this, you just need to change it back to whatever it originally was. If you could go into the BIOS now you could see what it is now and change it back to that, but without a keyboard you can't do that. You would have to just try different options until one of them worked.
If you still couldn't get a keyboard to recognize after doing that, though, you would be worse off (as mentioned before) because the keyboard wouldn't work and you couldn't boot the thing anymore until the keyboard did work.
There are other potential problems that can happen after a BIOS reset, but I can't really try to explain all of them. Suffice it to say the chance is significant that you would be worse off after it than before. Still, if you are desperate it is a potential option that costs $0.
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