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PhilonatorFlag for United States of America

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Laptop will not recognize battery

I went to upgrade this dell's bios and in order to do it you need the power cord and battery installed at 100% to upgrade the bios.  I can't upgrade because the laptop does not see the battery?  Anyone have an idea on how to fix this?

-I just deleted all partitions and installed a fresh copy of xp sp2 and updated it with all required updates, less the bios, and less SP3
-The battery is installed and charged.  If you pull the plug it works on battery. Reseating/remounting and rebooting in any one of these combinations does not fix the problem.
-Quickset is installed
-All drivers were installed from Dell and in the correct order, all perfect
-Dell Latitide D520 service tag 1r6v2b1
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Jamsb

Have you tried to perform the update under MS-DOS by booting from a bootable disk?
If you run the dell exe with the -writehdrfile parameter. So "D520_A06.exe -writehdrfile"
This will extract the dell bios. There may be another ultility that will let you flash the bios with this extracted file. There appears to be a utility for linux, I'm not sure if this will moan about the battery or not.
Actually a better way would be to run: 520_A06.exe  -writeromfile

Then you could try to flash the bios with a third party utility that wont complain about the battery. Such as Winphlash:
ftp://ftp.support.acer-euro.com/utilities/winphlash/winphlash-utility.zip
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ASKER

I can do what you are suggesting to get around the problem, but am not to crazy about using a non-dell flash program to flash a customers machine.  If it was mine, I wouldn't have a problem doing it.  The risk vs. reward to too great.

I left the machine on battery all night last night, will reseat it and see if the discharge helped.
The drain the battery down to nothing, unmount the battery, reseat the battery, plug in and boot to windows trick didn't work.  Any other ideas?
Is it in fact a 6-cell 56W Samsung battery (Dell part# N9406)?

The battery does not show up in Device Manager either?
If not, have you tried manually adding it with the Add Hardware wizard?
The drivers for it should be in Windows\System32\Drivers\
probably battc.sys and cmbatt.sys, but it seems like the chipset driver (R114079.EXE) should have set that up if windows didn't detect it as part of the HAL and ACPI during install. Was the battery in place during the OS install?
I don't think it is a Samsung, here are the specs from the battery it self:

Dell Branded type M9014 Rechargable LI-ion Battery rev A00 Capacity 56WH
I have formatted a 150+ laptops the method I used for this Dell, is the one recommended by Dell:

-install os from dell cd (in this case one of the green xp sp2 cds)
-install latest chipset from support.dell.com
-install NIC card, then rest of drivers

Battery was in the system the entire time, it is just this is the only one that I have ever seen where the system will not recognize the battery and yet the battery works perfect.
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Jamsb

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No, but that is the answer!

I had a d600 handy and it had slightly different specs:
Dell Branded type C1295 Rechargable LI-ion Battery rev A01 Capacity 53WH
and this one has a dell part number unlike the other one, it is G2053 A01

The cpu recognized the battery right off the bat.  I was able to flash the bios from a04 to a06.  I then took the battery in question and put it in the d600-same thing, system will not recognize it.  To me the problem lies with the battery.  Thanks for the help to all!
Thank you. Although it sounds like you solved your own problem there :)