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.

Update:

I tried booting with FDD or CD-ROM.

FDD is the only available option (probably blocked in BIOS - that I can't access) and it does nothing.
CD-ROM isn't displayed and doesn't boot. 🙁

Guess I'm stuck with desoldering the BIOS chip.
The HDD has a W2K install on it bt doesn't Boot.

Really puzzled, could it just be a reflash or a new CMOS battery necessary?
Edit: from this https://vaginessa.github.io/bios-pw/ it looks a reflash won't cut it.
A reprogram is what I meant, but at this point I need a copy and check... boring 🤣 unless... next question.

Is there a way t reset the CMOS without desoldering???

Any insight is welcome 😀

This is a picture of the area:

Nexxen wrote on 2025-07-07, 19:43:

This is a picture of the area:

Ehm... Nexxen, sorry to revive this quite old thread, but I own an XE3 which shows more or less the same 'features':
it boots every 4 attempts, it can't enter the BIOS pressing F2, as it hangs forever, but it is able to boot from floppy (DOS or GNU/linux are ok) , but the screen goes black in 5 seconds (energy saving feature?) until I press any key, then the screen reappears for 5 second, then goes off until I press another key and so on.

If I connect an hard disc, the notebook hangs, so I disconnected it, but the same thing happens if I try to access the CD rom from DOS with bootable floppy...

Have you managed to solve the problem with your XE3? If the answer is yes, could you kindly explain how and what you did to make this old notebook usable again?

[PS: Greetings from Italy!]

Tommaso74 wrote on Today, 18:35:

Ehm... Nexxen, sorry to revive this quite old thread, but I own an XE3 which shows more or less the same 'features': it boots ev […]
Show full quote

Nexxen wrote on 2025-07-07, 19:43:

This is a picture of the area:

Ehm... Nexxen, sorry to revive this quite old thread, but I own an XE3 which shows more or less the same 'features':
it boots every 4 attempts, it can't enter the BIOS pressing F2, as it hangs forever, but it is able to boot from floppy (DOS or GNU/linux are ok) , but the screen goes black in 5 seconds (energy saving feature?) until I press any key, then the screen reappears for 5 second, then goes off until I press another key and so on.

If I connect an hard disc, the notebook hangs, so I disconnected it, but the same thing happens if I try to access the CD rom from DOS with bootable floppy...

Have you managed to solve the problem with your XE3? If the answer is yes, could you kindly explain how and what you did to make this old notebook usable again?

[PS: Greetings from Italy!]

Ciao Tommaso!

Not yet, I still have to desolder the BIOS chip.
I disassembled another XE3 and I have to swap images between the working XE3 and the nc-XE3 (non cooperative 😀 - that's me trying to be funny btw).

I'm going to do a batch as I also have a XE2 that won't allow password reset but has a dead RTC battery...

I'll quote you as soon as I try something. My guess is that it's a known issue.
If you want to try something maybe replace the RTC battery, these machines have attitude issues when such battery is low on voltage.

Yours is XE3 or XE3L? L has also speedstep problems, showing the menu in bios every now and then + not writing settings. It drove people crazy back in the day.

Bye for now.