Gregory's Servertook it apart today and found that the CMOS battery connector is quite damaged.
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 in the meantime I printed up this cute little adapter so I can replace the dying hard drive.  @tubetime [places second pair of glasses in front of glasses] very cute, indeed!   @tubetime The ancient ritual, warping your perspective of time, as minutes pass in hours, and hours in minutes @tubetime I’ve got an HDD image of the OEM Toshiba Win95 install that came on my 100CT. After years of messing around with OpenBSD and OPENSTEP on mine, tempted to put Win95/98 back on it (and dual boot something else too) amazingly enough, the battery pack measured 9.3V, which means that at 3.1V per lithium cell, it's not totally destroyed. let's see if it holds a charge.  @tubetime as I'm sure you know the danger is of the cells being out of balance. If one cell is basically empty and the other two are bursting you've got issues despite having a healthy overall voltage. got the new CMOS battery, but I haven't ordered the new connector yet because I don't have enough of a list for a full Digi-Key order 😑  crap, it impinges on the RAM card. maybe this was a RAM card designed for another machine and someone just upgraded. hmmm, that explains why the old connector was so chewed up.  @tubetime There was a Portege RAM module which was often modified for use in Librettos - could be you have one of those. pretty tight but I think this is the best it gets without me soldering the battery wires down.  Could you sand down the top of the connector a few thousandths? now that I have a battery tab welder, I'm going to see how hard it would be to repair the main battery pack. it's hard to get the case open! here we go! it's a set of three paralleled cells. they are way out of balance. (L to R) 3.604V, 2.375V, 3.335V. @tubetime is it worth trying to manually rebalance or just replace the cells?  @tubetime tried something like this before and was already aware that the controller might brick the pack if it sees one cell being disconnected but even with external voltage divider and voltage it bricked the pack, maybe some intermediate connection, no chance to revive it… @fesix yeah I've heard that for some packs. I'm not sure it's the case for this one so it turns out that the original cells, Panasonic CGR17670HC, are long since discontinued, and the 17670 form factor is also gone. folks seem to recommend using 16650 cells instead. @tubetime I've tried looking for new ones a while back but they're rare these days. Might be a bad idea but a lot of Acer laptop batteries from 2010-2015 had Sanyo 16650s in them @tubetime @tubetime flashlight and vape stores tend to be the best. Those are pricey cells compared to the 18650 though. @tubetime nearest i could find is 17500 at batteryspace. dont be too weirded out by their 90s website, weve ordered from them at work, theyre okay. https://www.batteryspace.com/panasonic-li-ion-17500-cylindrical-rechargeable-cell-3-7v-830mah-a-size-3-07wh-0-25---un-38-3-passed.aspx @tubetime Odd question, what tab welder do you have/would you tentatively recommend for very casual/light use? I've been looking at getting one or maybe building something to occasionally rebuild packs and the reasonably priced options are kind of sketchy looking. (As if building one wouldn't be even sketchier! :P) But if they work fine, hey! @lothus i got a Seesii capacitive one. i don't trust the ones that short a Li-Ion battery into the probes... @tubetime Wow, the Black Wire Disease (corrosion creeping down the negative battery lead) really did a number on that cable and connector. @tubetime [places 3rd pair of glasses in front of first two] ah yes, windows 98. At one point I memorised the “enterprise key” we used at my first IT job for all OS installs. XP was out by the time I got my second one, and I automated that install process pretty quickly. |
yep definitely a battery problem. good thing these batteries are easy to find. P71007006043 appears to have been used in a bunch of different laptops.