Solved New Laptop Battery Results in System Shutdown when Charger Disconnected

The Bird Dog

The Bird Dog

This is my first post to this forum so please forgive me if any of the rules or protocols are violated ... it was not intentional.

I recently installed FreeBSD-13.0-RELEASE on a laptop and the installation and configuration was trivial and without friction. The system works exactly as required. However, I subsequently purchased and installed a replacement laptop battery and began experiencing an immediate shutdown of the system (hardware) when I unplug the charging cord. This is repeatable and occurs every time I unplug the charger with the new battery installed.

A snapshot of the power stats for the new indicates that the battery is charged.

Screenshot at 2022-03-31 08-45-47.png



When I re-install the legacy laptop battery and unplug the charging cord, the system does not shutdown but remains on and resorts to using the battery charge to power the system.

When once again installing the new battery, the shutdown on disconnect issue returns.

Any help that can be provided will be much appreciated.
 
From your screenshot, it is plain that not only have you install Freebsd, but you have a DE running on it too.

Does this peculiar battery behaviour only happen when you have the DE running?
 
Geezer said:
From your screenshot, it is plain that not only have you install Freebsd, but you have a DE running on it too.

Does this peculiar battery behaviour only happen when you have the DE running?
Click to expand...
It is an issue when running the desktop environment but also when running in "single user mode" within terminal.
 
In addition to covacat's remark, I'd take the new replacement battery out and measure the voltage over the pins with a DMM. If you measure the same 1V as reported on the screenshot and no higher usual voltage (also compare the original battery voltage: what does that report in the screen of your DE?) then you know more. I suspect that you might have a bought a bad battery: the serial number of 0001 looks kind of odd.
 
Last edited:
Erichans said:
In addition to covacat's remark, I'd take the new replacement battery out and measure the voltage over the pins with a DMM. If you measure the same 1V as reported on the screenshot and no higher usual voltage (also compare the original battery voltage: what does that report in the screen of your DE?) then you know more. I suspect that you might have a bought a bad battery: the serial number of 0001 looks kind of odd.
Click to expand...

A brief update to share with the thread ... based upon power stats shared with the vendor, they believe it's a faulty battery and will likely be sending me another one.

Will update the thread with resolution and or close after the new battery is received and tested.
 
Providing an update to this issue.

After further working with the vendor, their hardware technicians suspected the new battery could be in what they referred to as "pack state". They requested that I shutdown the system, then plug and unplug the charger 3 to 5 times to trigger the battery to accept a charge.

After executing their instructions, it did indeed cause the battery to begin accepting a charge and as a result the battery is now properly charging. After allowing the battery to reach 20% charge, I unplugged the charging cord from the laptop and the system remained on.

Both power stats GUI and...
Code: 
acpiconf -i 0
...display that the battery is now properly charging.

Screenshot at 2022-04-07 14-20-27.png


For others facing a similar issue in the future, consider the aforementioned steps to force the battery to accept a charge.

This was not an OS issue and was purely hardware related.

Case closed.
 
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