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it seems that my new battery of my lenovo x61 notbook got "deep discharged" due to a 4 month period of not using the notebook at all.

It seems that the "electronic" inside the battery does no longer allow the battery to be recharged if it was once "deep discharged". So the computer shows me "battery not recognized, please buy a new one/replace....". However the battery is more or less new.

Does anyone of you know where I can get information how the pin-assignment on the battery is, so I can charge the notebook battery "manually" until the eletronic starts working again. Or where to get this information.

I was not able to find any information about this at all.

Thank you very very much! jan

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  • Probably more appropriate for SuperUser?
    – mh
    Oct 16, 2009 at 14:22

2 Answers 2

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Recharging a deep discharged is dangerous which is why the batteries electronics stop the computer from charging it. Attempts to recharge from a true 0V lithium battery pack can cause the cells to fail violently when charged.

The battery cutoff is a safety mechanism in the battery. If you do attempt to recharge it could be very dangerous (Fire, Smoke, ect...) but if you want to most batteries have tiny text to show which pin is the +, -, T for communications. Charging should be done as slowly as possible with a lithium battery charge controller. Depending on the design of the batteries safety circuit it may be required to disassemble the battery to access the cells directly to bypass the cutoff.

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What a shady business practice. I am a Thinkpad guy myself but it seems like this is an attempt to get users to buy new batteries even if they are not technically needed.

The first thing I do would be to check the part number on the battery to get the exact number. Check with Google to see if anyone else has done this.

If not, it is going to be hard to figure this out yourself without having a charged battery. If it was charged you could check voltages coming out of it and try to deduce what is what. However these new batteries have a lot of circuitry in it and you have a fairly high chance of frying something from that.

Any chance it is under warranty still? Good luck...

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  • Hello Dave, thank you very much for your answer and advice. best regards jan
    – jan
    Oct 16, 2009 at 18:29
  • -1 That's not a "shady business practice", but a safety feature, as explained in John's answer.
    – sleske
    Jan 23, 2012 at 13:05

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