8 Cell Battery

Well, still getting on OK with the Dell Mini 9. Upgraded OS-X, upgraded the BIOS from A00 to A05 and re-ran DellEFI … what do you know, no more issues when trying to wake up from sleep mode. Sometimes it just wouldn’t, but others, it did so, but with no mouse pointer anymore… either way, the only way out was to press and hold down the power button until it turned off completely… but no this was a thing of the past!! Excellent news….. or was it..?

Well, so glad was I that I rushed on in and purchsed an 8 cell battery so I could run my Mini 9 for about 5 hours (or more) without needing to charge it up, and with the existing standard battery, if needs be, I could probably go a whole day….. or that was the thought.

The Battery arrived, and I immediately plugged it in and turned on. This was where it all started going horribly wrong… The first clue I had that things were awry, was the power light, continually blinking on and off… then after a quick P.O.S.T my Dell Mini gave me a polite message:

WARNING: The battery cannot be identified.
This system will be unable to charge this battery.

Strike the F1 key to continue

OK, so I continued on from here, and everything booted up, and ran correctly, however, the battery not being recognised, meant that it wasn’t being charged, and I had until the charge ran out to enjoy my new purchase… as long as the blinking power light didn’t get on my nerves… which it did! I contacted my provider and to be fair, they offered a number of suggestions, as did various forums I am in. There is for instance a wee application that you can run to fix things, which assuming your running Windows is OK… however, if you’re running OS-X, well, not so much to be honest…

There were a few people who weirdly didn’t seem to have issues though, and the only thing I could find in common was that they didn’t have the newer Bios version (A05)… no idea why this should be. So I went about downgrading the Bios to see if this would in fact cure the problem.

Now, there are many ways of doing this… pretty much all of them involve you using Windows… sounds familiar..?? Anyhoo, I found this wee app (flashBIOSv1.51.exe), which creates a bootable USB drive with options on it to upgrade, select specific Bios versions or indeed downgrade… OK, so I needed Windows to run it, but once I had the bootable USB drive, off I went.

Creating the boot USB was a breeze, booting up my Mini 9 from said USB the same, after navigating to the required Bios (vA00), I downgraded.

OK this is not an entirely worry free thing to do, but it went through no worries, and I booted back into OS-X, with no warnings about the battery, and the battery now charges… all sorted.

Or so I thought… I’ve got the flippin’ wake on sleep function problem back!!! … Ho-hum, it wasn’t really a major problem, so I’m (relatively) happy now..

Think I will reinstall OS-X with NetbookBootMaker/NetbookInstaller which is now in Alpha versioning, and do away with DellEFI… watch this space…

[UPDATE: 18/09/09 - Apparently most people have tried this, and downgraded to version A04, which works for them, but not for me. I suspect that this is due to them using a 6 cell battery, whereas, mine is an 8 cell one. ]

M:)