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107855
May 26th, 2008 20:00
Latitude D620 battery not recognized by BIOS or XP Pro
Hi,
I reinstalled my D620 from scratch (ie. formatted the disk) and reinstalled from the Dell supplied XP Pro media CD. I downloaded and installed all the relevant drivers. I have Intel wireless working, the nVidia card working at 1440x900 etc ... However, I can't seem to get the power/battery management to work. The D620 shows its battery light as green when the AC power is plugged in and the physical battery button lights up all the LEDs when pressed when the battery is partially/fully charged but neither the BIOS nor XP Pro recognize the battery.
Similarly, when the AC power is disconnected the battery works fine by itself for x hours but the power cord icon remains in the the taskbar and the battery light on the laptop glows orange as soon as the power is cord is disconnected. The LEDs on the battery itself however light up when the button is pressed on the physical battery. On reboot the BIOS also does not recognize there is a battery present and not does XP Pro.
In other words, everything works as expected of a laptop - except when totally wireless I have no idea how much juice/time I have left in the battery - this is fundamental to any portable device.
A few hours prior to the reinstall both XP Pro and the BIOS recognized the battery no problem and worked accurately and without fault - so I refuse to believe this is a bad battery. Somewhere there must be a driver to enable the BIOS and XP to recognize the battery - does anyone anywhere know about this ?
Please don't try to fob me off with some of the suggestions in the threads I have read in this forum that the battery is dead and should be replaced - read again what I said above - the battery works and both XP Pro and the BIOS were well aware of its existence prior to the reinstall a couple of hours earlier. All I did was to format the hard drive and initiate a totally fresh install of XP Pro - and installed the drivers downloaded from Dell based on the Service tag of the D620.
Any advice/help/solutions genuinely appreciated ...
ejn63
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May 26th, 2008 21:00
Did you install the Dell notebook system software and the chipset driver before loading any other drivers?
Check the contact on the battery and mainboard to be sure they're clean and not bent.
If nothing comes of either of those, it is still possible that one of two things is faulty:
The battery, or
The system board.
Since the battery costs about $150, while a system board will run more like $400, the first part to try replacing is the battery. Just because it holds a charge, doesn't mean there's not something wrong with the logic board inside the battery - or with the DC circuitry on the mainboard.
devnuller
4 Posts
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May 27th, 2008 06:00
Now that's a good question and I can't be sure of the answer because I was flying blind with regard to driver install order. I couldn't find any docs on the downloads site to tell me which order the drivers should be installed nor did I know which drivers I should be installing so I simply followed my instinct and went for the "recommended" first followed by any "optional" I thought I might need.
The questions now are, what is the "Dell notebook system software" called within the downloads site ? And, the chipset driver (R138226.exe) on the downloads site is labelled as "optional" so I didn't initially install it and the BIOS driver (D620_A10.exe) wouldn't install because the system needs to recognize the battery first.
I would really appreciate it if I could simply download the required system software as a single package rather than navigate through a selection trying to figure out what is required to make the basic functions of my laptop work. Failing that, a clear and concise ordered list of which drivers to install would be really useful. I'm sure either of these are available on the downloads site but I couldn't find them.
Thanks for the advice
I shall ignore the latter half of your post ...
ejn63
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May 27th, 2008 08:00
Order of install:
XP, then SP2 or SP3
Notebook system software
Chipset driver
Then: all other drivers: audio, video, modem, network, etc.
If the battery still doesn't show up after a proper install, you have a hardware problem, whether you choose to acknowledge it or not.
devnuller
4 Posts
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May 27th, 2008 11:00
devnuller
4 Posts
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May 31st, 2008 15:00
bitterly disappointed ...
I set out to follow your instructions as above until it occurred to me I couldn't follow up the XP install with the SP installs until I had some soft of web connection, so I followed the order I found here :
http://support.euro.dell.com/support/topics/global.aspx/support/dsn/en/document?journalid=4E32DD9BC4060C9CE040A68F27282E47&docid=303237#2
After the NSS install the battery didn't show, after the chipset install the battery didn't show - nevertheless I continued and completed the list but the battery didn't appear in either the power management software or the BIOS ...
I then borrowed a battery from another D620 and immediately my own D620 recognized it when it was clicked into place ...
Fabulous news eh? So it looks as though my own battery is buggered afterall, or at least the onboard logic card is defunct because the battery still holds a charge, the onboard LEDs light up when the button is pressed and the laptop runs off its power quite happily - albeit with the laptop battery light glowing a constant orange and no way of telling how much juice is left ...
This leaves me full of suspicion. Basically within the hour it took to format the drive and initiate the new install the battery logic card ceased to function? I don't think so. It sounds to me more like some sort of bizarre conspiracy to sell more batteries. Either that or the battery/power management firmware installed in the new install does not support the original factory shipped battery (I bought the D620 in September 2006 and the one I borrowed the battery from is circa 2007). I'm well aware hardware has a tendency to fail, but given I have previously personally owned two other Dell laptops both of which ended up with dead batteries within 12-18 months as well as non-Dell laptops whose batteries are still functioning perfectly several years later I am rapidly reaching the conclusion the quality control in some Dell kit is extremely poor/non-existent.
I've been buying Dell laptops for business and personal use since 1995, however following this most recent incident I won't be buying any more.
Thanks for the assistance, this is the first time I've used this forum and I'm impressed with the rapid response - shame then I probably won't be using it again ...
Regards
ex-Dell customer
Rinke1
1 Message
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December 28th, 2011 09:00
any solution?
i have the same problem see here
en.community.dell.com/.../20019565.aspx
gblaptop
1 Message
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March 7th, 2013 13:00
try using your battery in other laptop if their is same problem
then your battery software is corrupted
if battery works fine in other laptop then your laptop bios is corrupted by some driver. try updating bios with recommended bios driver from dell site.
JWayde01
1 Message
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September 16th, 2015 08:00
I have the same problem that the starter of this conversation had. I have a dell latitude d620, and the battery lights light up when i press the physical button. it runs off of battery power, but the BIOS and the system os (ms windows xp) refuse to recognize that a battery is plugged in. I would really appreciate some help with this, because i am going to install windows vista on the laptop, and i need to update the bios first. but I cannot flash the bios because it says that the battery is not plugged in. please help