iBook won't boot from battery

[jwboyd]

A month ago, I took my iBook in the car from hot Kansas to hot Texas. It was in a carrying bag and I tried to keep it out of direct sun. It was, however, locked in a hot car at times.

When I try to boot from battery only, it gets to the desktop and freezes with only the hard disk icon showing. It will go no farther, even after I plug in the external power supply. Everything works fine when I start up with the power supply plugged in.

I've done all the Norton Disk Doctor and defrag routines. What else should I do?

[Bill]

jwboyd

I just picked up a book myself.
So I was doing some homework on it. Just out of curiosity I used sherlock and typed in powerbook. It took me to apples data site.
One of the general questions there struck my attention on batteries.
Believe it said if you have problems with your battery, turn your book on and let it run the battery down till the low battery dialog comes up (or whatever comes up) and then once the batteries drained (it did say it has a reserve amount of charge for emergencies    purposes), then recharge the battery back up to full.
This might or might not have anything to do with your situation but you never know.
Try running over to apple and finding those general questions.
Could also be you 'cooked' the battery beyond repair.

[ljocampo]

This sounds like a low battery symptom.  Bill is right you should completely drain the battery and then fully recharge it.  Although, these Li Ion batteries don't have memory charging problems that the older NiCads had, the company still recomends you fully drain and recharge your Li Ion at least once when its new and every other month or so.

[krissel]

Have you tried resetting the power manager?

Read this article

Many places I've visited say that discharging Li-on batteries regularly is really not a good idea. You may indeed have changed the ability of the battery to hold a charge by exposing it to such high heat.

QUOTE

Li-ion batteries are quite different from previous designs such as nickel-metal-hydride and nickel-cadmium. Li-ions do not require and should not be subjected to regular deep discharges. Maybe the initial discharge Apple apparently suggests for new batteries is useful, but it's not something you should do regularly.
Buchmann also reports that, while it has many benefits, the Li-ion design also has an essentially fixed life, which means you need to budget for replacement in three years or so regardless of how you use the batteries, or even if you don't use them at all.

Here's another idea to try:

QUOTE

resuscitating Mac laptop batteries in Mac OS X:

[Rob Wyatt] I'd like to share a recent experience with my iBook (white, dual USB, 600mHz). I hadn't used it in a few weeks and when I turned it on, the battery was completely dead. I booted up the machine and was very surprised to find that the battery wasn't even recognized. There was a little "X" over the battery icon in the menubar (OS X 10.2). I attempted to re-seat the battery, zap PRAM (using the key combo upon startup), and reset the Power Manager. Nothing worked. So I called tech support and they had me do all of those things over again. Finally they agreed to send me a new battery.
  In the meantime, I decided to try one other thing (after reading about iBook battery issues somewhere online). I booted into Open Firmware and typed "reset-nvram", followed by "reset-all". Surprise, surprise...my battery came back to life and recharged fine.

But do try the power manager reset first.