Can spilling water on an old PS2 keyboard cause system crash, malfunction and BIOS problems?

Question

I leaked some water in my PS2 keyboard while it was connected. I turned my keyboard upside down to let the water out and didn't think much of it. Within 15 minutes my PC hard disk starts rattling and my monitor says 'no signal'.

When I tried to reboot (multi-boot Windows 7 and 10) the first time it said 'resuming Windows 7' but my PC became so slow and there was a huge delay on typing, if any keypress came through at all.

When I rebooted again it was stuck in a loop, rebooting as soon as it passed the BIOS checks (all HDDs found, no memory problems everything seemed fine).

When I enter the BIOS to check if there is anything wrong the BIOS is almost completely unresponsive. The BIOS screen is messed up as soon as I start pressing keys. It does not respond to most keypresses and instead starts replacing the text on the screen with blank space.

Is there any chance that this is caused by the water spilled on my keyboard? What is the suggested course of action?

Answer 1

Since the answer that I marked as correct has been removed, I will try to answer it in my own words based on the answers that I got.

Yes, it is possible that spilled water in a keyboard causes malfunction. The water causes the keyboard to send unexpected signals back to the motherboard, possibly in a different voltage. Most motherboards have protection against this, but if this erroneous signal somehow gets through it can cause all sorts of malfunction.

In my case the following errors occurred:

• Hardware malfunction. Harddrives started rattling without a particular reason.
• OS malfunction. Windows crashed and was unable to boot while the keyboard was plugged in.
• Videocard malfunction. Monitor randomly turns off and on again, the image on the screen was distorted.
• Master boot record was destroyed.
• BIOS messed up. Grafically and in terms of accessibility. When keys were pressed the screen became distorted.

I know this was caused by my keyboard because I tried a different keyboard and all problems were gone, except for the boot record thing. I had to reinstall my OS.

I hope this helps for anyone having similar problems.