Keyboard Oddness

[whizkid]

I bought a 560E on eBay for a buck. You get what you pay for. I know it's a "legacy" machine, but I think its problem is not model specific. I'm hoping anyone who has had a similar experience with ANY model will contribute.

Anyway, the 560E had a 301 error. I re-seated the keyboard cable and could boot. (And found some personal data files, Windows 98 and some Pampered Chef software... all promptly deleted.)

But the B,N, space, slash, and left, down and right arrow keys didn't work. Bummer, but not awful since it came with a port replicator, and an external keyboard worked fine on that.

Yesterday I received a NEW keyboard from somebody on eBay, plugged it in and the same keys STILL don't work. (But it does look much nicer, and my wife was thankful for the new TrackPoint cap!)

There was some damage to the 560E case, as though it had been dropped on its corner, and a screw was loose in the case. My fear is that a pin on the keyboard controller has been blown, in which case I'd new a new planar.

Is it possible that a trace just got nicked and I can add a wire to the board?

What else might cause this symptom?

I'll probably just live with it and use an external keyboard, mouse and display. Not a bad MP3-playing station for a buck... plus $15 for the 4GB disk, plus $18 for the 64MB RAM stick, plus $15 for the keyboard that doesn't help... I'm going to go broke buying $1 ThinkPads!