My Battery Replacement Write-up NOT needed... See Jay's

[fixup]

I refilled two X20 batteries (10.8 and 14.4), both ended up useless. BatteryMix says they are completely discharged and may need 10 hours to charge, but they never charge, always 0%.

After some search, the problem is: once you take out a cell, the chip lost voltage before a bit had been written into the EEPROM. After the new cells, the chip cannot read that bit in the EEPROM and think one of the cells are broken and refuse to charge.

When I have time, I might make an EEPROM adapter and use the Smart Battery Workshop to re-write the EEPROM to get these batteries back working again.

For all of you: when you refill, make sure you use the bridge method - parallel new cells to the old cells and then remove the old cells. This is quite dangerous, but you don't need to re-write the EEPROM.

[makai]

I just did another successful transplant, this time, using batteries from a new (dtd 2008) 6-cell Toshiba battery pack I purchased on ebay.

All I did was disconnect and pull the old batteries out of the X31 case, disconnect and pull the batteries from the Toshiba, connect up the X31 wires/board to the new batteries, leaving the black (neg) wire as the last wire to connect, then stuck everything back in the X31 case. There was a bit of wire modding I had to do since the Toshiba and IBM boards are a little different thereby the wiring length/style differed. Nothing major, it just consisted of adding wires in place of what was there for the original IBM board.

After the transplant, installed the battery pack into my X31 and Battery Health indicated the battery as "red" with "0" time remaining.

After running through the 3rd charge/discharge cycle, battery health is at "green" with 2hrs as remaining time. And, after 5 charge/discharge cycles, battery is at green with over 4.5hrs indicated for remaining time.

I've done 3 transplants with my X31 packs and have had no problems whatsoever. I'm not doing anything special when I swap the batteries, so I don't know why others are having problems.

I'm purposely using batteries that come from other laptop batteries for the simple reason that their ratings/performance is intended for use as laptop batteries. Besides that, it's way cheaper than buying Li-ion batteries not meant for the application... no matter if they are supposedly higher rated in mah. This transplant cost me $14.80, plus a little bit of my time. There is no way to purchase six 3rd party Li-ions for that amount of money so its been a worthwhile venture for me to go this route.