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Unibody MacBook Pro models with 13" displays produced from 2009-2012.

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battery dead: 5 flashes after calibration attempt

I'm running a Ubuntu based distro on a 2013 (edit: 2012) Macbook 13".

I bought a replacement battery from iFixit about 2 years ago. Battery's been working great but lately I've been having an issue. The battery time displayed the correct time remaining but the percentage was dramatically off. This was causing the unit to hibernate while the battery still had 1.5h of charge left (displayed as 2%).

I wanted to calibrate, but because I couldn't drain the battery as recommended, I edited UPower.conf to UsePercentageForPolicy=false which then let me drain the battery.

After draining the battery I left the machine alone for 5h and then charged overnight.

Unfortunately now the machine won't see the battery. Pressing the physical hardware power key I get 5 flashes. The machine will boot while plugged in via Magsafe.

I've tried:

  • resetting SMC
  • disconnecting the battery and leaving 24h

I still get the same result.

2 questions:

1) anything I can do to fix this with existing hardware?

2) will buying a new battery fix this?

EDIT: See screenshot of the Coconut app's main screen. Looks like the machine is completely ignoring the battery.

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Do you have a bootable macOS drive to boot up the system as you really need to leverage the tools we have that run under macOS.

Once you have macOS running install this gem of an App CoconutBattery. Run it and take a snapshot of the Apps main window posting it here for us to see. That will give us the information to move forward.

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crwdns2944067:08crwdne2944067:0:

Thanks so much for the quick reply.

I was able to track down a bootable copy of MacOS. Doesn't look good. No idea of what could have possibly happened here.

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@sustainabl15924 - What does CoconutBattery show you? Post a snapshot here so we can see as well.

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@danj So sorry for the confusion. I've edited my original post to include a screenshot of coconut battery's main screen.

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@sustainabl15924 - Well this batteries microcontroller has failed! SMC is working as we are getting the charger is connected. Time to replace it.

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@danj Well that's good news. 2 follow up questions if you've got the time:

1) what would have caused this - was it something I did?

2) CoconutBattery reports the power supply is not connected even though it is. Is there any chance a battery replacement won't work here?

Thanks again for your help.

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