My battery seems to break with either every kernel or major Fedora update.
Ever since the new update to Fedora 44 and the new Thinkpad kernel were made available, my battery refused to charge and the laptop turns off as soon as it is unplugged.
The problem persists even after upgrading the kernel, and Fedora from 43 to 44.
Same thing happened the last time a new kernel update dropped, where my battery refused to charge all of a sudden, and I had to replace it to perform the kernel update.
Sounds like a hardware and/or firmware issue rather than a Linux kernel and/or Fedora issue. The Linux kernel uses drivers to get info from the battery about its status, etc., but it doesn’t manage charging.
A simple test is to power down the Thinkpad and leave it plugged into the charger. Check it in an hour to see if the battery charge has increased. If it hasn’t, the problem is with the laptop.
I have the same exact issue on the same exact model and it has like 8 months. I don’t think it’s a battery issue, mine was working fine yesterday and i haven’t changed a thing since then, also didn’t drop the laptop or anything..
I do agree that it seemed highly suspicious that the battery started acting up at around major updates drops. Twice in my case, out of nowhere. Highly inconvenient.
I had it replaced both times and it seems like the second time’s the charm, hadn’t had an issue since.
Given that we had the same issue, if you find a solution that doesn’t involve replacing the battery, please feel fee to share.
Boot into the BIOS. Leave the power plugged in for a few hours. Remove the power.
If the machine turns off, there’s an issue in the BIOS, the motherboard or the battery itself.
When there is no OS loaded, there’s nothing other than the laptops own internal metrics for charge level, charge rate, capacity, etc. to alter or impact the charge rate.
You might also want to run a battery recalibration to ensure that the values reported to the kernel from the hardware are at least vaguely correct.
So after contacting Lenovo, they told me to send my pc accordingly to the customer warranty and it was in fact a defective battery..
That’s crazy tho, I bought the pc 8 months ago and to have it already fail on me Is crazy to me
Yeah, I have a ThinkPad x201 with a second hand battery and it’s been 1 year with no issues lol
It took a a lot of time.. Before sending it they told me it would take 5-10 days for the whole procedure and to have my pc back in my hands. I dropped off the package on the 11th of August, and I just received the mail today that my pc was finally repaired and was coming back..
There was a whole shenanigans with the shipping because Ups was supposed to take the package directly from my house but I wasn’t available. so they told me to drop it off at a Ups shipping point, and then they made me panic for days calling me and telling me they had a call to pick it up at my house but I had already dropped it off and they had no info on their side because Lenovo and ups weren’t in contact. The Lenovo tracking website wasn’t working properly so I had no idea where my pc was, and on ups tracking website it was written “destination adress has been changed”. I had to call Lenovo customer service multiple times to get infos, and was called multiple times to tell me that I needed to ship my pc (which was already done a long time ago!!) so the whole experience was really stressful, and I hope the pc arrives in good shape.
At work I once had a failed under warranty IBM drive. IBM arranged to have it shipped by UPS, but UPS did not cover my location so was using a 3rd party shipper. The 3rd party shipper wanted additional paperwork to import the drive to the US, and refused to pick up the drive. It took many phone calls to learn that IBM’s arrangement with UPS meant the cross-border paperwork was handled by IBM. Took weeks of phone calls to get the 3 parties to sort things out.
I think large enterprises now routinely destroy failed drives out of concerns that data might fall into the wrong hands.
