Compaq Armada 1750 BIOS hardware replacement

Folks,

I've gone and made a 'bush league' error and lost my power-on password. The truth be known I used a strong password with special characters that the BIOS write utility was more than happy to accept when writing to the FLASH target but are rejected at the power-on password prompt (I didn't do enough homework, silly me).

I have it on good authority that I'll have to replace the BIOS chip itself and given that HP has acquired Compaq I doubt that they'll entertain my service request (posted it to the support site earlier this morning) for such a late model product. Does anyone know of wher I can obtain a replacement BIOS chip?

Dave.

I was happily living with my laptop up constantly (forty-five days uptime and "shutdown -r now" when required) and was considering purchasing a UPS to maintain operation in the face of power outages when a kernel panic forced me to revisit the problem. Although unlikely, I hope someone can learn from my stupidity. When typing quickly I occasionaly transpose characters such that "the" often comes out as "teh" and I often press the shift key +/- one character. With that in mind I decided to brute force my pwd looking for adjacent single character transpositions and shft. My power on password was "axTh,?2". On relfection, I realized that '?' unshifted is '/' a reserved character that erases the BIOS power-on pwd. The BIOS ignored the '?' and my power-on pwd actually turned out to be "axTh,2". My first attempt "axTh,2/" thus deleted my power-on pwd! I know this may not be of particular use to anyone searching for "Compaq Armada 1750...". That having been said I hope my mistake can help others in two ways: 1. Don't ever give up. 2. Take the time to analyze your own seemingly unrelated behaviours to solve a problem, any problem. Cheers!

How inspirational!

had this problem and all i had to do was:

1. Remove all battery packs from the battery bay and multibay, if applicable
2. Disconnect the AC Power
3. Remove the real-time clock battery
4. Wait five minutes
5. Reconnect AC Power
6. Restart the computing, during POST a '162 System Options not set' message
appears
7. Shut down the computer then disconnect AC power again.
8. Replace real-time clock battery
9. Install the battery pack(s)