R40e battery won't charge. BIOS problem?

[miamime]

I'm refurbishing a R40e for my kids to use, so I used the recovery partition to bring it back to factory specs. In the process of reconditioning the battery I noticed that it wouldn't charge back up.

The battery indicator says ZERO, and the battery status says it's in the yellow zone, but even over night it won't budge past zero.

I thought maybe it was a BIOS issue, but I can't update the BIOS without a fully charged battery.

The battery was bought this summer, so I don't think the battery is kaput. Besides, it was holding a charge before I used the restore partition.

The CD-Rom is busted and I don't have a floppy drive, so booting from those is not an option.

So, I'm in a pickle. Ideas? Thoughts?

[IBreakThings]

I'm pretty sure there are workarounds for updating the BIOS without a charged battery. I don't know if it's possible on the R40, though.

As for other boot options, the R40 has USB boot support, so make a bootable flashdrive with Ubuntu or something. There's tons of tutorials on doing that, so Google is your friend.