hello,

In brief: Battery doesn't charge, empty now, I want to update the BIOS, to see whether this helps. BIOS update is refused without battery.

In greater length:

In January, my Dell Adapter stopped working and I bought an all purpose adapter that worked fine for two months. Then the battery wouldn't charge anymore. The BIOS setup says: communication problem with battery. At startup I get:

“The AC power adapter wattage and type cannot be determined. The battery may not charge. The system will adjust the performance to match the power available. Please connect a Dell 45W AC adapter or greater for best system performance. To resolve this issue, try to reseat the power adapter Strike the F3 key (before the F1 or F2 key) if you do not want to see power warning messages again. Strike the F1 key to continue, F2 to run the setup utility. Press F5 to run onboard diagnostics.”

I am not sure in which order these problems occurred, but it's around the same time.

I am currently at BIOS version A17. The most recent version is A24. If the adapter and the battery are connected, the battery LED flashes 3 times orange and once blue.

First I went to an official DELL repair center (in Peking). They plugged in an original Dell adapter, got the same message at startup and said that I would have to buy a new battery, online as they didn't have it. Then I went to a normal computer repair shop that had different fitting batteries and adapters. The batteries were recognized, but wouldn't charge, as the error about the “AC power adapter wattage” remained, even with Dell adapters. So luckily I didn't just buy a new battery.

So basically it can be a motherboard problem or a software problem that may have been solved by a more recent BIOS version (or maybe by an older version that checks less carefully the adapter).

Before I give up this still nicely running computer, I'd like to try to update/downgrade the BIOS, to see if this might make the computer charge the battery again, as has been suggested many times for different dell computers that stopped charging.

I can get the BIOS to perform the update process with the /forceit /forcetype options, but then, when rebooting, the BIOS update refuses to flash: “The BIOS Update could not be performed because a battery was not present. Press 'Y' to continue”. The option /jabil doesn't seem to work on this BIOS update at it gives the message invalid command line parameters.

I also extracted the hdr file, updated via ubuntu, following https://wiki.ubuntu.com/DellBIOS, ending up with the same message at reboot. So I'm still stuck with the old BIOS version.

How can I override that “battery present” rule?

Thanks in advance for any hint or anything else I could try!