Keyboard wont work and bios can

(1) plug in an external keyboard.

(2) unplug laptop from wall and remove battery. wait 3 mins for capacitors, etc. Then plug back in. Did that fix?

(3) replacement keyboards are fairly cheap. See YOUTUBE for plenty of videos on how to swap the keyboard for toshiba satellite

(4) If the bios can't use the keyboard then it's not a bad OS install causing the problem. Guessing from the working above you know that. You also know that typically you boot from the recovery partition and have it do a restructive restore. Before you do the destructive restore you can copy data off the hard drive using a USB to SATA adapter. Post for details if you need them. Your friend may have some things on the disk they really want. Duplicating the disk to an external USB drive takes a while but is not hard.

i found the problem.... for some reason which evades me since im not a hardcore electrician, when i lifted the keboard off its resting place everything worked fine, bios booted up right then windows OS....i restarted several times and everything was good but until i sat it back down on its place the keyboard was unresponsive and it went haywire... the thing was it that metal backing of the keyboard was touching a couple of thin metallic/aluminum pieces on the palm rest... everytime i brought down the keyboard on these metal pieces it would act crazy and it would become unresponsive...so ur guess is as good as mine.. i put some plastic patches (ones used to fix flat tires) and voila!! no more shorting and everything worked fine! for anyone having this kind of problem maybe this is a solution for you!   thanks everyone who responded!