Actually the correct time to enter the BIOS/CMOS menu is after the 3 LEDs on the keyboard for NUM LOCK, CAPS and SCROLL LOCK light up and turn off, which shows that the keyboard is functional at that point.
If the key is unknown, the first key I would try is DEL, if that does not work, I would try ESC through to F12. (Basically just slide across all those buttons, as one is bound to be correct).
The only ones you won't get correctly are the combination ones, which I don't believe I've seen one in years, so they're probably becoming obsolete. Another sort, was the shunt/jumper method that would boot straight into the CMOS if it was closed, again I haven't seen these machines since the 386 PCs.
A lot of people don't realise that you don't need your CDROM drives to be detected, you can set those HDD settings as OFF instead of AUTO, the only drawback is it won't be seen when trying to boot from the CDROM drive, but if you have 2 or more CDROM devices and you know you only use 1 of those drives to boot from, then you don't need your startup to check the other drive for bootable media.
Cheers,
MC
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