T30 - wont run on battery power

[skystyler]

Hi Guys

My daughter spilt a big glass of coke all over her T30 several months ago. I thought that was the end of it, but miraculously it still works fine in every aspect bar one. It wont use the battery. I have changed the battery to no avail. The battery light flashes whenever a battery is installed as if the battery has no charge. I have another T30 that wont post that I can use for spares. Is there anything I can rip off the dead one to fix this problem?

cheers
Luke

[rkawakami]

It is difficult to say exactly what you should remove/replace on your system in order to get it to work. About the best advice I can give would be to remove the motherboard and completely clean the area around the battery contacts (as that is usually where the battery circuitry is located). Isopropyl alcohol should be able to clean up any remaining traces of the liquid spill that could be causing a problem. Clean/inspect the area around the battery contacts, up to about two inches away. While you are doing that, look for some components like this:

http://www.kawakami-ca.com/ibm_t2x/t23_ ... _fuses.jpg

This is from a T23 but similar parts are probably used in the T30. Since you say that the battery is not being charged and the system cannot run with the battery alone, then that seems to point to a fuse. I've circled two fuses that are on the T23 motherboard and which also may be used on the T30. The bigger of the two, marked with LF10A on top, is the main fuse for the battery. To the upper left of that fuse, there's an "F12" printed on the motherboard which identifies that fuse. You can test to see if it is still good by using an ohmmeter (multimeter). Putting the test leads of the ohmmeter across the metal end caps of the fuse should result in a measurement of 0 ohms. Anything more than that means the fuse has blown. There is a smaller fuse, labeled "F9" next it it but I believe that it may only control charging of the battery.

If you don't want to remove the entire motherboard from the base, you may be able to access this portion of the T30 motherboard by simply removing the keyboard and keyboard bezel. Since the T23 and T30 systems are very similar in this area (a battery for the T30 can be used in the T23), the layout of the motherboards should be about the same.

[evening_hunger]

Hate to excavate zombie threads, but I'm just here to give credit where it's due and confirm the accuracy of the above post. So, yes in 2022 I have worked on a T30 that had the very same issues/symptoms. Thanks to the post of rkawakami, I was able to rule out the mobo being broken (the aforementioned fuses were not blown). Thanks to this I concentrated on the battery pack itself and it looks as if had helped.

And to increase the "googleabiility" of this thread (guess how I found it): yes the T30 has both F12 and F9 fuses, they're positioned slightly differently than in the T23 photo, but are trivial to find and measure.

[christophocles]

Hate to excavate zombie threads, but I'm just here to give credit where it's due and confirm the accuracy of the above post. So, yes in 2022 I have worked on a T30 that had the very same issues/symptoms. Thanks to the post of rkawakami, I was able to rule out the mobo being broken (the aforementioned fuses were not blown). Thanks to this I concentrated on the battery pack itself and it looks as if had helped.

And to increase the "googleabiility" of this thread (guess how I found it): yes the T30 has both F12 and F9 fuses, they're positioned slightly differently than in the T23 photo, but are trivial to find and measure.

Did you ever get your T30 working again? I found the F9,F10,F11,F12 fuses, checked them and they were not blown. I hoped it would be as easy as changing a fuse but sadly that is not the case. I am wondering what to do next... Take it all apart again and check the ADP3806 charging chip, I guess....

[evening_hunger]

Hi there, well, what happened is that after my last post, I tried to focus on the battery pack and repair anything I can inside the pack. I had moderate success, my pack now charges up to sth like 22% but won't budge above that. (it also won't report to Linux ACPI, so it's a mess, I use it in blind)

I am using a very particular battery pack which I built mostly myself (by re-celling an original one) and so I think it's a viable hypothesis that changing it (the pack) would help. However, since my last post here I was unable to find a good seller for a T30 battery pack.

On ebay seller proposes a pack that I already had (it didn't charge in my T30). Another one has a different pack but won't answer to questions if they guarantee it's functionality. One French store tries to import T30 packs but have nothing. So, a pack limbo for now. But the machine itself works reliably. I guess I won't know much more until I get another pack.

I have never found, to summarize, that there's anything suspicious in the machine itself, only the packs.

[kfzhu1229]

Hi there, well, what happened is that after my last post, I tried to focus on the battery pack and repair anything I can inside the pack. I had moderate success, my pack now charges up to sth like 22% but won't budge above that. (it also won't report to Linux ACPI, so it's a mess, I use it in blind)

I am using a very particular battery pack which I built mostly myself (by re-celling an original one) and so I think it's a viable hypothesis that changing it (the pack) would help. However, since my last post here I was unable to find a good seller for a T30 battery pack.

On ebay seller proposes a pack that I already had (it didn't charge in my T30). Another one has a different pack but won't answer to questions if they guarantee it's functionality. One French store tries to import T30 packs but have nothing. So, a pack limbo for now. But the machine itself works reliably. I guess I won't know much more until I get another pack.

Have you made sure that your cell voltages are more or less equal? If you have one group of cells whose voltage or capacity is drastically different than others, then the battery will stop charging as soon as one of the groups reach 4.2V, and if the voltages are drastically different in other cells at that point then the BMS will give up the trickle charging and leave you with a barely usable battery and low percentage.
T30 is a bit of a weird one since it requires higher performing battery cells than T2x do, thanks to Pentium 4-M. Just because the battery and BMS works on T2x does not mean it will work on T30.
IBM should've stuck with higher cell counts with Pentium 4-M systems as they don't put nearly as high of discharge requirements to the battery cells.

[evening_hunger]

Hm, small update here. So I bought a new pack, a replacement of course. There are improvements, but some problems persist.
So to begin with, the new pack is now recognized by the system correctly, even the Linux ACPI can talk to it. However, I am still suspicious, as I experience an issue similar to what kfzhu1229 described: it stops charging in a rather bizarre way. It will never charge above sth like 50% (as reported by ACPI), and sometimes will stop as low as 33%, upon which the LEDs go green, as in charged.

It is thus possible this new pack has the issue with non-evenly charged cell groups? is there any way to treat this?