I can’t find an active thinkpad centric community on here I am just going to post here. My Thinkpad T480s, 16 GB RAM, 238 GB SSD is randomly shutting off while at like 50%. When I try to open it back up it always is dead and I have to connect charger to boot it up again. Why is this happening? Is it battery issue? It complains about not being able to read temp2_input while shutting down and sometimes say PM usage count underflow. Not sure what that is supposed to mean.

  • Nawor3565@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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    1 year ago

    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.

      • Nawor3565@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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        1 year ago

        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.

  • erer@lemm.ee
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    1 year ago

    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.

  • tal@lemmy.today
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    1 year ago

    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?

  • Queue@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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    1 year ago

    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.

  • moreeni@lemm.ee
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    1 year ago

    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.

    • tal@lemmy.today
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      1 year ago

      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.

    • 257m@sh.itjust.worksOP
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      1 year ago

      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.

  • Sleestak_Chaka@lemm.ee
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    1 year ago

    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.

    • panmeek@lemmy.sdf.org
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      1 year ago

      yeah very helpful, the first community has 36 members, the other has 4

      probably it’s not even a thinkpad specific problem