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 2026-04-01, 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.

Grazie mille Nexxen!

These days I tried to disassemble the XE3 laptop again and I replaced the RTC battery with a lightly newer battery I had around.

I also cleaned many solder joints of SMD resistors/capacitors / IC etc.

Well... things are the same or --- worse!

First thing I forgot to say: the BIOS is password-protected and at the 4th boot attempt if I press F2 to enter the BIOS setup, I can enter 3 wrong passwords and the system halts returning an error code of five zeroes 00000 just like your Xe3.

Now the laptop boots still every 4 attempts, but the floppy won't start anymore: it doesn't even appear in the 'choose boot order' menu, that appears if I press 'esc' key immediately after the '4th boot attempt'. In the boot menu the only 2 options are: Hard Disc and CD-ROM. If I insert a bootable cd into the drive and choose the CD-ROM boot option, the system doesn't wait the boot sector of the CDrom, the 'OPERATING SYSTEM NOT FOUND' message appears instantly. Pressing 'enter' creates another 'OPERATING SYSTEM NOT FOUND' line.

I tried with an IDE/Compact flash adapter and I chose 'Hard Disc' at the boot menu, but it's all the same
as the Cd-Rom.

I think I'll give up for now.

Let us know if a BIOS chip replacement fixes the issue!!! Good luck!

Saluti - Bye!