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I'm on an Thinkpad x220, Ubuntu 12.10, kernel 3.5.0.22, recently updated BIOS (1.37) : today out of nowhere, my computer shuts down immediately when I unplug it, even though the battery is present, recognized and charged.

It won't go beyond 66% charged though. In power statistics, the battery is recognized as having a 37.2wh charge and as being healthy. The 'time to full value' however, is 0. 

Power statistics:   
Device: battery_BATO Technology: Lithium Ion 
Vendor: LGC Model: 42T4865 Serial number: 10189 Present: yes Rechargeable: yes
State: charging  Voltage: 11.9 V  Energy: 37.2 Wh  Energy (design) 62.2 Wh   
Percentage: 66.2% Capacity: 90.4% Time to full: 0 seconds Time to empty: 0 seconds

I have tried unplugging the battery, reboot, replugging the battery, reboot as described in the answer here:

and I have tried adjusting the settings of dconf Editor (In org > gnome > settings-daemon > plugins > power I changed the value of critical-battery-action to nothing. I have also unchecked the option notify-perhaps-recall), as described here:

Tried installing tp_smapi, as described here: when opening stop_charge_thresh,in /sys/devices/platform/smapi/BAT0 (there is also a folder for BAT1), I saw that the threshold for stopping charging was 100. When opening start_charge_thresh , I am unable to open the file. In terminal I get this error:

 (gedit:3617): WARNING **: Hit unhandled case 0 (Error reading from file: No such device or address) in parse_error.

all to no avail, unfortunately.

Is this a broken battery? Or something else? How can I find out?

UPDATE: the battery no longer shows in the system tray. I can however still find its specs and status with: upower -i /org/freedesktop/UPower/devices/battery_BAT0

Thank you

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  • 1
    What laptop is this concerned? Did you install the latest BIOS update? Does your OEM manufacturer provide a tool to re-calibrate your battery? To me this seems like a confused power controller (hardware, embedded), unrelated to Ubuntu. However, it could be a bug as well - do you run another OS as well by chance?
    – gertvdijk
    Jan 31, 2013 at 18:48
  • Please post all of the battery statistics. Of particular interest is the voltage, design voltage, and design capacity.
    – psusi
    Jan 31, 2013 at 18:57
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    Please edit your question to provide the additional information. This is a Q&A site, not a discussion forum and comments are not fit for this.
    – gertvdijk
    Jan 31, 2013 at 19:20
  • 1
    @Peeperkorn "my computer shuts down immediately when I unplug it" Do you mean it's an instant-off (unclean) or a graceful shutdown? In the first case, I believe this is a hardware issue. The power to the system should still be active on non-ACPI aware operating systems when you unplug the power cord. To clarify just boot into the System BIOS configuration and unplug the power cord. If that still instant-powers-off the system: go and RMA the laptop or battery.
    – gertvdijk
    Feb 1, 2013 at 10:26
  • 1
    @Peeperkorn Please contact Lenovo services. This is a hardware issue, clearly. I'm sure they'll be able to help you out by pointing out what just became clear. I'm voting-to-close this question for the reason being unrelated to Ubuntu and therefore off-topic.
    – gertvdijk
    Feb 1, 2013 at 14:19

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