BIOS problem

[minesheep]

I was unable to use terminal effectively because the keyboard was garbled (e.g sudo blkid was showing as s4d6 fd5s2).

sudo's ascii is 115, 117, 100, 111 and in binary it is 01110011, 01110101, 01100100, 01101111
s4d6's ascii is 115, 52, 100, 54    and in binary it is 01110011, 00110100, 01100100, 00110110

Also pretty weird to note that "d" in sudo was registered as d but in blkid it was reqistered as "2"

d have ascii (in lower case) 100 and 2 have ascii 50
so d in binary        01100100
    2 in binary        00110010

looks like your keyboard cable is moving to wrong location inside your laptop. It probably have like 8 or 10 thin cables to move key presses to computer from keyboard and these cables may be shifting.