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HP Omnibook XE3 - help for troubleshooting

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First post, by Nexxen

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Hello all!

I recently bought this XE3, L variant, laptop.

My issue so far is that it powers on, does some POST until a point and then stops.
If I press F2 to enter BIOS it stops there forever, if I press ESC to chose the boot source, it doesn't do anything.
"Entering SETUP ... " stays there indefinitely. No shut down or black screen.

Sometimes it completes the POST tests, but F2 and ESC if pressed do nothing.
After a short while the screen goes black and nothing happens, keyboard LEDs don't change.

I tried:

- unplugging the CD-ROM (I'm looking for a W98 disk to try a boot)
- unplugging the HDD
- unplugging the FDD
- removing the battery (mostly dead)
- move around the 2 x 64MB ram sticks

Unfortunately I'm not home (I have no tools with me) and I'm, for now 😉 , just hoping anybody had a similar issue in the past.

Thanks in advance. (pics following later)

PC#1 Pentium 233 MMX - 98SE
PC#2 PIII-1Ghz - 98SE/W2K
"One hates the specialty unobtainium parts, the other laughs in greed listing them under a ridiculous price" - kotel studios

Reply 1 of 1, by Nexxen

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After reseating CMOS battery, keyboard and mousepad connectors it started allowing to finish the POST every 4th time I power off and on the machine.

I'm currently stuck at password check to enter the BIOS after pressing F2.

I found this here from Deksor, HP omnibook XE3 bios password ,
but it doesn't work as I'm getting "00000" as hash number (5 zeros). Probably I need to replace the cmos battery with something new.
Edit: every time I run the program it gives a different result. Even with 12345 I can't get the same password twice.

System battery is dead, tried to recharge it but after getting hot it holds no charge, even if at the beginning it did something like 1 minute straight.
IDK 😀

Btw, HDD has no OS on it.

Edit2: after trying a fair share of generated passwords I'm left with desoldering and reflashing the eeprom.
I hoped I didn't have to tear it all apart. Well, this is retro business helped by others' work, a thanks to dagobert.

PC#1 Pentium 233 MMX - 98SE
PC#2 PIII-1Ghz - 98SE/W2K
"One hates the specialty unobtainium parts, the other laughs in greed listing them under a ridiculous price" - kotel studios

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