Sounds like a bad battery
this post was submitted on 21 Oct 2023
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When you say you need to connect the charger to get it to boot up again, do you mean boot to Linux or even to just show the BIOS? If the former, it might be that the battery level isn't being read correctly by the OS, but if it's the latter, the battery or its related circuitry is likely failing and you'll need a replacement battery.
I dosen't show BIOS no signs of life until charger is plugged in.
In that case, I don't think the problem is with Arch. The battery is likely shot, as going from partly charged -> dead that quickly is a very common symptom of one that's reached the end of its life.
Honestly, why isn't there a thinkpad community here
There is, but this is probably not a Thinkpad specific issue
To find communities, use this:
https://lemmyverse.net/communities?query=thinkpad
Searching a Fediverse instance will only find communities that that instance knows about. This indexes all of them.
Thanks Ill use that in the future.
Are you using battery thresholds and keeping your laptop connected? There is a bug in ThinkPads, at least with my t480, in which the batteries get discharged over time but doesn't get reported which causes the sudden power off. If you are using TLP I suggest you to either force a full charge or a recalibration to charge your battery properly. Also don't discard the possibility of having a broken battery.
That sort of sounds like whatever is displaying battery remaining is somehow getting things wrong, assuming that the battery is actually discharged. I can't think of much that would prevent you from at least being able to power up to the BIOS if you honestly had battery charge.
You can see what the kernel is telling userspace in:
/sys/class/power_supply/BAT0/energy_full
And
/sys/class/power_supply/BAT0/energy_now
Other things that might cause it...there is some software that will auto-hibernate or similar when your battery reaches a certain threshhold. If you consistently have the thing go down at 50%, that could do it. But I don't know why that would prevent you from booting the thing without charging it. You tried holding the power button for seven seconds or so to make sure that the thing is really powered off and not in some suspend mode or something and ignoring taps on the power button?
Oh, wait. 50% and Thinkpad. I used to have a Thinkpad with two batteries.
https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/Lenovo+ThinkPad+T470S+Batteries+Replacement/140443
That looks like the T470s has a dual battery, and unlike mine, they look like they're the same size. Does your T480s have dual batteries?
EDIT: The T480 apparently does. Does the T480s?
https://www.reddit.com/r/thinkpad/comments/a4iben/t480_confused_on_how_to_charge_2nd_battery/
EDIT2: I don't see anything that looks like a second battery myself in this:
https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/Lenovo+ThinkPad+T480s+Battery+Replacement/144009
So I'm guessing not.
I use Fedora on my T470 with no issues. It might just be Arch. Have you tried other distros? I wish there was a ThinkPad community here.
I also use Fedora on a 2008 Mac Pro with no issues. I'm really surprised how good it is because I've been using Linux since the 90s and never had it just run smoothly on my older hardware.
Fedora and arch should run the same kernel.
There are lots and lots of possible reasons for this to happen, so people will need some more information to help you find the issue.
Are you able to boot it at all after it shuts down? How often does it "randomly" get shut down? How do you determine your battery has 50% before it shuts down? Can you check if it happens on other operating systems? What does "it complains" mean, is it a warning in journalctl? Also, please post precise outputs of any errors you might see in journalctl at the time it shuts down.
How do you determine your battery has 50% before it shuts down?
Debian has a program in the battery-stats package that logs battery at a (by default) 30 second interval. That has a pretty graphing program too. I dunno if Arch packages that, but if not, not hard to roll your own.
#!/bin/sh
while true; do
echo $(date; cat /sys/class/power_supply/BAT0/energy_now) >> ~/battery-log
sync
sleep 10
done
That'll get you a capacity within ten seconds of the next shutdown. If you save that log, repeat it running until it dies a couple times, you can probably tell if it's consistently at the same capacity that it goes down.
Here a picture of the screen I get before it shuts down.
I am using upower to determine the battery status. It happens once every day or so. It posts the messages in the tty as it shuts down. systemctl schedules the shutdown slightly ahead of time.
Yeah I think that's a battery issue. If you can run the computer fine without it, that might eliminate the probability. Maybe check if a firmware update is needed, but I think simply if the battery hasn't been swapped, it's probably due for one.
yeah very helpful, the first community has 36 members, the other has 4
probably it's not even a thinkpad specific problem