Thinkpads Forum

The CMOS battery died in my IBM Thinkpad X131e, and it rendered it a complete brick....Esc does not continue, F1 does not enter setup, even Ctrl+Alt+Del does not restart it. I tried to catch the splash screen before this but F1 does not work there either. Tried an external USB keyboard still nothing.

Did some Googling and found this model and a few other Thinkpads do this when clock battery dies. It does not use a standard CR2032 it takes a proprietary lithium CR2025 with a pigtail wired connector. So I bought a new one, installed it....and nothing its still completely unresponsive to any input. WTF?

Compare the wires from the old and the new battery.
Are red and/or black on the same side of the connector?
Ditto for white and white?
If not, swap the new battery wires around, it got + and - the wrong way around.

Yes the wire colors match. I am concluding the BIOS is corrupt. I let the laptop sit on a shelf in standby until the primary battery died it beeped and shut down. I thought nothing of it and went to use it a week later and got this error. I did verify the CMOS battery is indeed dead with a multimeter, it reads 0.1V and the new one reads 2.99V so it certainly had something to do with this. Something must have gone wrong with Debian in a suspended power state when the CMOS batt died. Really unfortunate.