Fix Lenovo T430 Laptop Battery Charging Restriction by Patching BIOS

This post is all about the step by step procedures to: Fix Lenovo T430 Laptop Battery Charging Restriction by Patching BIOS.

Normally when the original factory version of Lenovo Thinkpad Series Drains out, the need to replace another one becomes necessary.

Sometimes due to BIOS restriction hardwired to the system putting a Battery that wasn’t made by Lenovo Originally will not be able to charge.

Therefore, this post shows you the step by step process to by pass this restriction. So any laptop battery that can fit into the Lenovo Thinkpad Terminals  from any manufacturer can efficiently be charged.

Fix Lenovo T430 Laptop Battery Charging Restriction by Patching BIOS

I tried a new battery on my LENOVO T430. On booting it up, at the BIOS loading stage I got this, prompt: “the battery installed is not supported by this system and will not charge t430”.

Who can relate to this?

If you encountering same problem. This post, will provide you with step by step guide of how you can fix this on your Lenovo T430.

It was the same procedures, that would be described, in the coming lines, that I used to solve it.

Well below is how it all started. With also fix for this problem provided. Just read gently through. And follow the procedures to come. Good LUCK!.

So my Lenovo T430 Laptop battery got bad, which means the battery can no longer hold power for a while.

Instead it shutdowns few minutes after the power adapter have been removed from the wall socket.

Basically, I would have had to carry my power adapter everywhere I go at all times. I needed a battery swap.

So, a friend using similar battery on same LENOVO T-SERIES laptop, gave me his own.

But this time, it was a  9 cells 55++ battery.  The type that had extra-battery cells. And kind of huge.

Since, my friend no longer uses the system due to accident that crashed everything except for the battery that went unscathed.

I took the battery confidently to try out on my Lenovo T430, there it is!. I got a message from the BIOS while booting up the PC, that the battery isn’t genuine, not compatible and will not charge the battery.

Unless I get a compatible battery from LENOVO. To think that same battery with the incompatible message is a Lenovo battery left me in awe!.

I hit ESC to load, the computer OS to see whether it charges.

But, it didn’t has expected. Ok! I gave up, then, instead, I got a newer 9+ battery, the exact battery that came by default in Lenovo T430.

To my surprise, after plugging the battery and hitting for the power button to turn up the machine.

In the BIOS booting I got same not original battery issue, so won’t charge the new battery! I was stunned again.

Tried many fix, like, installing new power drivers adapter, updating the BIOS, shutting down the Lenovo T430 by long pressing the power button and few others to no avail.

I decided to hit unto Google for similar threads and possible solutions to this selective battery charging of Lenovo T430.

To my surprise, I found other people also faced similar challenges owning to Lenovo hard wiring Lenovo T430 BIOS and other similar model BIOS.

This was made with the intent to only charge batteries that came from within LENOVO. This means if you got the battery from other vendors, you may be bound to face similar problems of not charging.

So what I did, was to stick with Google for possible solutions, after about several hours of checking few related articles!.

Thanks to God first, a reddit post from some geeky guys, a youtube video(Sebi’s Random Tech) and a Github page(hamishcoleman) page.

I was able to combine all of these to form one concise solution to patch the BIOS of Lenovo T430 to work with the 9 cells 55++ and any other variant of Lenovo battery that can fit into the power pin of the laptops.

Here is the procedures I applied given below:

How to fix Lenovo T430-Selective Charging Issues:

1. First I updated my Lenovo T430 to the BIOS version 2.76(G1HT35WW) by downloading g1uj43us.exe via this  LINK.
2. After downloading, Ensure you have plugged the computer to the power source before updating to the latest BIOS.

Here are the first two steps I did, the next step, is to get LINUX to run on your machine.

Because you need to use LINUX to create the BIOS patch in order  to remove the battery charging restriction of some battery out of the BIOS.

To install LINUX and create the BIOS patch I used steps below:

1.  Got two flash drives. (You can get an empty hard drive, memory card or any storage that is empty formatted in FAT32 extension)
2. First flash is to create a LINUX OS that can run on the USB flash drive without installing into your machine. So you don’t have to worry whether it will delete your already running operating system like Windows.
3. Second flash is to accommodate the patch. That is copy the created BIOS battery patch from LINUX to it.

Here are the procedures listed below to create the Lenovo T430 battery patch:

#1. Step one: Create Bootable Linux Mint Flash drive:

• Well! you can use any other linux distro for this e.g. UBUNTU. In my case, I used LINUX MINT version 17 32bits. You can download linux mint 17 32 bits from this link: LINUX MINT 17 32BITS. The file is around 1GB.
• After download completion of Linux Mint iso file, note the location.
• Download Unetbootin app for Windows. Install Unetbootin app to your Windows computer. This will allow you make bootable LINUX mint flash drive.
• Open Unetbootin
• Under the Distribution tab, select : LINUX MINT
• Under the Version tab, select: 17
• Under disk image: Locate the Linux Mint 17 iso file downloaded previously and select.
• Select Type: either USB drive or Hard disk
• Select Drive of the selected option
• Click on OK, to start the creation of LINUX MINT bootable flash drive process (Usually can take up to 5-15minutes). Sit back and relax!.

After the process finishes, next step is to boot into Linux Mint by shutting down the computer, while restarting, select boot options from Bios to boot from the flash drive.

Which leads us to second step:

#2. Creating the Battery charging Patch fix for Lenovo T430:

•  After booting into Linux Mint, Select the first option Default, wait for few seconds to boot up Linux Mint
• Connect your computer to the internet via WiFi in Linux Mint. Connection button, usually at the bottom right hand corner.
• Open Terminal
• type: sudo passwd root
• this will prompt you to enter a new password, type : a
• Prompts you to reenter password, type: a   again
• type: su
• enter password, which is : a
• Now you have root access.
• copy and paste this line of code into Terminal:

  apt-get install build-essential git mtools libssl-dev

• then when done, copy and paste this into terminal also:

  git clone https://github.com/hamishcoleman/thinkpad-ec

• then when done. copy paste this to Terminal once more:

  cd thinkpad-ec

• Then copy and paste this also:

  make patch_disable_keyboard clean

• When done, copy and paste this code also into terminal:

  make patch_enable_battery clean

• Next step is to copy and paste this line of code or type:
  If you get an error then change the Capital T in T430 to small t430.

  make patched.T430.img

• When done!, now we have to copy the created patched Bios file to an external drive or flash. This is where the second flash memory card comes in.
• Still on the terminal, type:

  lsblk

  this list all the connected drive on your computer. Note the assigned drive letters of each of the drives with their allocation size. NOTE!: Becareful not to format all of your hard drive by selecting it.

• After noting the flash drive you want to copy the patched Bios file to type copy and paste or type: Replace sda5 with the drive letter combination assigned to the external flash drive, in my case it is sda5. Using the code below, will erase everything inside the drive and replace with the patch Bios file.

  sudo dd if=patched.T430.img of=/dev/sda5

• When done! Voila! Shutdown your computer plug in into Lenovo t430 the flash drive/hardisk/memory card containing the created Bios Battery patch
• Select boot option to boot up from the Flash. Doing this, will install the Battery Patch.
• Successfully installing the patch by step above will eliminate the battery charging restriction of LENOVO t430.

Any Question regarding this stuff! hit me via the comment link below.

Thanks for checking by Stay save!. The step below shows how I fixed by Lenovo T430 not able to charge specific battery.

Now my Lenovo T430 can work and charge with all batteries types provided the pin is compatible from all vendors making Lenovo batteries.

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