OT: Laptop battery and BIOS

I bought an HP ze4300 for $17. The picture on ebay showed a green led indic ating a good battery, but when I get it the battery doesn't seem to work. T his site says it might have something to do with the BIOS.

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" DESCRIPTION: The battery for your notebook PC will not charge. When thi s occurs, the notebook charge LED blinks orange and the battery status LED on the battery itself does not light. RESOLUTION: First, download and install the latest BIOS revision KHF.25 from the link below."

I have Puppy Linux installed and I'm having trouble getting wine to create the boot floppy. So I'm wondering if it is worth trying to flash the bios. What are the odds that this is a bios problem? I figure the battery has bee n sitting around for a long time and has become completely discharged. Once a lithium battery has become completely discharged is it dead? Is it possi ble the bios can't deal with a completely discharged battery and a new bios will fix that?

Thanks

Reply to
Wanderer
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On Thu, 10 Mar 2016 07:55:00 -0800 (PST), Wanderer Gave us: snip

You cannot put it on a USB stick and use the HP utility?

OR, boot an old (scoff) windows install disc and use the repair facility to get a command prompt and run it (format A:) from there.

Reply to
DecadentLinuxUserNumeroUno

It's worth a try, but I wouldn't expect it to help. I think it would be far easier to find a friend with a windows computer and have them make you a floppy. Windows computers are everywhere, you know ;-) If you don't tell anybody, you won't be ostracized for doing it the easy way.

What typically happens is that the cells discharge below a "safe" value and charging is disabled by the battery.

I've had varying success with laptop batteries. Sometimes, you can open up the pack and charge each cell individually. Be careful to limit the current to a low value and carefully match the resting voltages. Wear eye protection and a fireproof suit. Do it outside so you won't burn the house down when it catches fire and explodes. Unless you know what you're doing, do not do this.

If the cell voltages were high enough, sometimes the battery starts to work. If the cell voltage was too low, the battery charge controller loses it's programming or just locks out the battery completely.

I've had batteries that just refused to work. Others would charge, but the battery monitor in the laptop had no data. It just ran till it quit without notice. I even had one that would charge with the laptop off, but not on. It always ran off the battery, even if AC was plugged in. Only way to run it and keep the battery charged was to remove the battery after it charged and before running on AC. The only locked out battery that fully recovered all its functionality had a PIC processor for a charge controller. Resetting the PIC fixed it.

It's not unusual to "recover" a battery and have the orange light still blink. The computer might say that it does not have the battery it's running from, but it might still work, until it discharges and quits without notice.

With linux, it's not clear what will happen with which version of Puppy you have.

So, I've had a high percentage of "dead" laptop batteries that could be made to run the computer. There's always a risk with lithium. I'd never sell a laptop with a "fixed" battery.

Reply to
mike

tely

The HP utility creates a boot floppy.

Using Windows is a good idea. Linux sucks. I just killed Racy Puppy install ing pets to handle wine's complaints about missing dependencies. Before Rac y Puppy I tried Wary Puppy which didn't work. Before that was Porteus. Port eus would go to sleep after 5 minutes and not wake up from the keyboard or mouse. No one on their forum new how to fix that. I have spent days trying to get Linux to work on this laptop. Fifteen years ago I had Red Hat 6 and dialup. I could never get anything to work. Anything I tried to install was always 'missing dependencies' and I seemed to always need to leave my comp uter on all night to download files with the hope that it would make someth ing work. Before that I has SUSE. That was the best one. It was like playin g with the VAX back in college with all those command line games like Star Trek. It's been down hill ever since. Don't tell me it doesn't crash. Redha t crashed all the time and now Racy Puppy just crashed and I bet the only f ix is to reinstall the operating system.

Reply to
Wanderer

ndicating a good battery, but when I get it the battery doesn't seem to wor k. This site says it might have something to do with the BIOS.

this occurs, the notebook charge LED blinks orange and the battery status LED on the battery itself does not light.

HF.25 from the link below."

ate the boot floppy. So I'm wondering if it is worth trying to flash the bi os. What are the odds that this is a bios problem? I figure the battery has been sitting around for a long time and has become completely discharged. Once a lithium battery has become completely discharged is it dead? Is it p ossible the bios can't deal with a completely discharged battery and a new bios will fix that?

rk.

I have a computer with Windows 7 on it but doesn't have a floppy drive. The HP program creates a boot floppy. The laptop has a floppy drive. The progr am won't run from DOS.

Reply to
Wanderer

On Thu, 10 Mar 2016 11:28:42 -0800 (PST), Wanderer Gave us:

It doesn't get any more retarded than a stupid f*ck like you.

Reply to
DecadentLinuxUserNumeroUno

On Thu, 10 Mar 2016 11:31:32 -0800 (PST), Wanderer Gave us:

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Reply to
DecadentLinuxUserNumeroUno

If you use a package manager such as apt, yum, or dnf (the new yum replacement), all you usually need to do is enable the right repositories, and all the dependencies are looked after automagically. If you have old stuff that you like that isn't on the repos, you can do a hand build from source, or (usually) just copy the binary. It isn't that hard, and there are lots of good instructions on the web. (My favourite text editor, xx, isn't open source, and the build I use is about 8 years old. Works fine as long as the i386 versions of libc6 and libX11 are installed.)

I use several different Linux flavours--CentOS 6.5LTE, Mint 17.3, Knoppix, Debian 8, Fedora 23, and Qubes, and have got away from Windows almost entirely on account of their evil new EULA. They all work fine for me, on Thinkpads and Supermicro AMD servers. Installation can be a bit of a pain if you have unusual hardware, but I haven't had Linux crash on me in probably 5 years except when I was messing with GRUB.

Maybe once or twice a year I'll have to restart X using the three-finger salute, but for production it's at least as solid as any Windows, IME.

What it really needs is a good debugger, comparable to the ones in Visual Studio or the late lamented (*sob*) IBM VisualAge C++. VAC++ had the most beautiful debugger I've ever used, whereas the Linux ones are about like Microsoft CodeView for DOS.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

--
Dr Philip C D Hobbs 
Principal Consultant 
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Reply to
Phil Hobbs

Thank you. I apologize for the rant. The HP ze4300 is too old. It won't boot from a USB drive. F10 doesn't work. It has a floppy drive that's how old it is.

Reply to
Wanderer

Thanks. I know I need to more patient. The crash did something to the hard drive. I used Gparted to fix the errors. It seems to be working again. I'm going to put it aside for a while.

Reply to
Wanderer

Once the battery is completely discharged, NO BIOS will do; remove the battery and toss it.

Reply to
Robert Baer

USB floppy for the win7 machine? Surely you know at least one person who possesses a windows machine with a floppy??

Looks like your laptop has a CDROM. You may be able to boot from a CDROM and install the bios from there. You may be able to boot the Hiren's CDROM and use that to create the floppy directly on the laptop without any linux issues.

Anybody who claims to be numero dos or better can tell you how to convert your bios install floppy image to a bootable CDROM using your windows machine... if you ask nicely and can prove that your mother meets acceptability criteria that justify your existence. Just email them the floppy creation file and ask them to email you back a .iso file to create the bootable CDROM with the bios update.

More likely, it will be far less stressful to just google it.

Reply to
mike

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