Replacement of CMOS battery: no effect on clock

[BigCatAndy]

Hello everyone,

actually I concider myself to be rather fit in ThinkPad-related questions, but now I have one issue, which bothers me since a couple of weeks, and I have no Resolution for it. Perhaps, some of you could give me a hint.

I have TP T60p, and sometime ago I noticed that it started to loose the time. I bought at eBay new CR2032 battery, and replaced the old CMOS battery with a "Hand made" one (red wire on the "+", a black one on the "-"). Unfortunatelly, it brought nothing - as soon as I remove the Laptop battery, my BIOS clock is reset. I have replaced my CR2032 twice (thinking, it is a bad/used one), I also switched the wires - no effect. Does anyone of you have an idea, what happened with my BIOS/CMOS?

In the past I replaced CMOS batteries on 600x and T22/23 - it worked. Here it doesn't. No idea why.

Thganks in advance, best regards from Hamburg/Germany
Andrey

[RealBlackStuff]

You can get ready-made CMOS batteries galore.
Anything from T20-T61 and several newer ones will fit.
However, if you make a mistake like swapping + and - you could have blown the BIOS (in which time/date is stored).
I'd suggest you try and reinstall BIOS first, making sure you have a working CMOS battery (~3V with a multimeter).

[BigCatAndy]

Hello @RealBlackStuff,

Thanks for your hint.
I cheked my BIOS Version - it is not the latest one (2,23 instead of 2.27). So, I plan to reinstall BIOS using the CD from Lenovo site. I hope, this will help.

I decide to use "home made" battery, because I managed to do it in the past easily, without an issues.

Regards,
Andrey

[BigCatAndy]

Hello,
just decided to post an update: the reason was that "self-made" battery. I updated BIOS, installed "the real" CMOS battery (bought at eBay) - and it works. Somehow it didn't work this time with a self-made one. But the battery itself (CR2032) was not the reason - I placed it today into my 600x (which also had dead CMOS battery) as self-made replacemenet, and it also worked. So, most probably, the cable/connector were damaged.

So, the issue is resolved.

Cheers,
Andrey.

You can get ready-made CMOS batteries galore.
Anything from T20-T61 and several newer ones will fit.
However, if you make a mistake like swapping + and - you could have blown the BIOS (in which time/date is stored).
I'd suggest you try and reinstall BIOS first, making sure you have a working CMOS battery (~3V with a multimeter).