Thinkpads Forum

So everything I read in advance indicated this battery would work in my ultrabay slot on my W500. Even looking at it and holding it on top of the ejected DVD drive the footprint is identical. Shining a flashlight into the empty bay it looks like everything should line up okay. It has a recess on the left slide to slide over the SATA connectors, male power on the right side looks like it should plug into the power in the bay just fine.

Yet, it doesn't/won't go in all the way, comes up just short by about the depth of the male power connector. DVD has a little black plastic attachment in the center, on the leading edge going in. Wonder if that depresses something inside the chassis and it needs to be put on the battery (battery doesn't have a screw hold)?

What am I missing? Why won't this work, other than the obvious of perhaps it really isn't compatible? But it looks like it should.

Thx in advance.

Every reference I can find says it's compatible. For example -
http://www-307.ibm.com/pc/support/site. ... MIGR-69713

I had a problem last week, where I got my w700 back from a depot repair. I removed the battery, optical drive, and hard drive prior to shipping and started putting those back in when I received back from the depot.

I had the same issue as you regarding the optical drive, it would slide in and stop 2 mm's short, i.e. the optical drive stuck out 2mm's.

I have an serial drive caddy that I have and was able to slide that all the way in, although it did require a little wiggling.

I looked on the back and looked at the keys on both of these, the black thing that sticks out, and while similar they were not exact.

Also the hard drive caddy isn't as tall as the optical drive, so that must be compatible with thinner note books too.

So in the end I called ibm repair and they had me take it to a local lenovo service provider (aka repair shop) and they fixed it. When I picked it up they mentioned that the locking mechanism, to keep the drives from falling out, needed to be adjusted. But that was just the receptionist so who knows what the tech really did.

I did look at the hmm (hardware maintenance manual) but to get to the cage, you basically have to take off the top/bottom assemblies, and the lcd lid/cover. You might be able to remove less to fix this. At the time I didn't know what the issue was, the roll cage was one of the things that were replaced at the depot, and I didn't want to tear the machine apart only to find out that I didn't have the parts to fix it.