Can't bring up BIOS on HP Pavilion G4

[JH210]

Trying to get into BIOS at Startup. Keyboard was removed & re-installed to fix Fan. Hitting ESC at boot up does not give me BIOS but instead gives me instead "no HDD with error 3F0" and "hit F2 for system diagnostics". Tried with HDD & W/O HDD. HD can be read on another computer w/o any problems. If my port for the HDD is bad, I would like to change boot order to boot from external drive.

 Question1- Is there an easy way to rule out that the Keyboard is not the culprit or do I have to take out the keyboard and re-install again?

 Question2- The screen is asking for me to hit F2 but nothing happens

 Question3- Is there another key I can hit besides F2 that will give me the bios startup screen from the error message of "No HDD error 3f0" Tried them all but nothing happens, not even a beep.

[WAWood]

@JH210 

Forcing a change to the default boot order to put an external device FIRST is a really BAD idea!  Why?  Because after that, ANY TIME you have ANYTHING plugged into any USB port the laptop is going to hang up on trying to boot from that, and this include mice, keyboards, USB sticks, etc.

We strongly recommend AGAINST folks changing their own keyboard for this very issue.  There are very fragile ribbon cables and connections that can be easily damaged, and from your description, that is most likely what has happened.  My guess is that the BIOS can no longer access the drive through the cable, but I have no idea WHY and we have no way to test that from here.

Since you apparently can no longer run diagnostics yourself, you have no way to test it either.

All I can suggest at this point is taking the laptop to a local laptop repair facility and paying them to see if they can do anything to fix it.

[JH210]

Thanks for the quick reply and your thoughts on my keyboard might be bad from me removing KB to fix the CPU Fan. To overcome this, I bought a USB keyboard and was able to send an ESC to the computer & I have accessed the bios. I changed boot order to access my system disk in an external caddy & the computer recognized my system disk but told me it had to do an automatic repair which I decline.

I am currently cloning the system disk using macrium Reflect & if it fails due to read errors I will use another cloning s/w that can do Sector to Sector. I will report back on any major progress with repairing/replacing my keyboard & progress in getting my system to recognize my cloned system disk since there is a possibility that I might have introduced another problem with the port on my motherboard. 

[WAWood]

@JH210 

I believe that Macrium can also do a sector-for-sector backup -- you will have to check the backup options as I never use that since I like the compression it provides.