Arch Linux

zopeadg40

Member

Registered: 2025-12-01

Posts: 1

Thinkpad T480 External Battery not being detected

Hi, I bought a thinkpad t480 today, put Arch Linux on it, and it all works just fine. However, I saw that I only had a maximum of 3 hours of battery life on it, then I ran tlp-stat and battery 0, my external battery, would not show up at all anywhere, not even in the KDE System/energy monitor app. I tried taking out the battery and putting it back in. I also tried hitting that emergency reset button inside the pinhole. Also tried a combination of both options. Nothing works. Any idea as to how I could fix this?
Thanks!

jsov

Member

Registered: 2025-12-10

Posts: 14

Re: Thinkpad T480 External Battery not being detected

This is odd.

First of all, to confirm. The battery still works, correct? You can run the laptop unplugged?
Also, is the laptop generally in good condition? This may not be a Linux issue, but we will keep trying like it is for now.

For a good first step, you could try a firmware update.

# pacman -S fwupd
# fwupdmgr refresh
# fwupdmgr update
$ reboot

If that doesn't work, some logs would be nice to have. I know it's annoying to get all these logs, but it really does help troubleshooting.

the outputs of

$ acpi 

$ upower -b 

You could through "dmesg" for any errors concerning the battery or acpi.  Perhaps run:

# dmesg | grep -i "acpi\|battery" -C 3

and let us know what you see.

If this doesn't show anything interesting, I might have a few more ideas, but let's try this first!

Thank you,
J

Last edited by jsov (2025-12-10 20:33:04)

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