Hello, I hope someone has the answer to my problem because it's just insane.

Fixing a dell E521 (amd) for a friend, I was going to install windows xp fresh, but no keyboard would work when computer ask to press F2 to go to bios, at first I thought it was because I was using wireless kb, but then I used a Dell regular usb kb and computer still didn't go to bios as the usb doesn't get the power fast enough.  so i decided to remove the battery to clear cmos and hope the default boot up was cdrom first.

now I have a bigger problem, pc is searching for the card reader boot or usb devices I guess, I get these errors now:

 

diskette seek 0 failure

keyboard failure

Invalid bios configuration, go to setup

press F1 or F2 to continue

 

so that's it? the computer can't be used because I can't enter the bios?  it doesn't have ps2 ports. I don't have any usb hub connected or anything weird. Computer was working fine but has a lot of viruses, so fresh xp was needed.  It no longer has warranty. How can they make a pc with such a flaw?  assuming that there aren't any working around.

Thanks in advance for any help.