This is a weird one. My MSI S260 laptop's keyboard doesn't work prior to the OS. I can't access the BIOS, I can't even select an item in Grub. I need to wait until Ubuntu has loaded before I can use my keyboard. When I boot from a live CD, the pre-boot menu also is unresponsive to my keyboard, but once in the live CD OS, the keyboard works flawlessly. This is a major pain in the butt. Anyone ever encountered this weird problem? Any fixes?
I would say check your BIOS for a keyboard setting with the options 'OS' and 'BIOS' but if you can't even get into BIOS something sounds very wrong. Does it work if you plug in an external keyboard?
If the keyboard is USB, then chances are USB support pre-OS is turned off, USB keyboard support is off, or is has something to do with your port 60/64 emulation settings. If the keyboard is PS/2, then the process is a bit different, but it would be rather weird why it doesn't work. It may be possible that only support for the embedded KB is disabled so you might be able to check settings using an external KB. Otherwise, you will need to find the proceedure to load defaults on the laptop.