I can’t find an active thinkpad centric community on here I am just going to post here. My Thinkpad T480s, 16 GB RAM, 238 GB SSD is randomly shutting off while at like 50%. When I try to open it back up it always is dead and I have to connect charger to boot it up again. Why is this happening? Is it battery issue? It complains about not being able to read temp2_input while shutting down and sometimes say PM usage count underflow. Not sure what that is supposed to mean.
Sounds like a bad battery
When you say you need to connect the charger to get it to boot up again, do you mean boot to Linux or even to just show the BIOS? If the former, it might be that the battery level isn’t being read correctly by the OS, but if it’s the latter, the battery or its related circuitry is likely failing and you’ll need a replacement battery.
I dosen’t show BIOS no signs of life until charger is plugged in.
In that case, I don’t think the problem is with Arch. The battery is likely shot, as going from partly charged -> dead that quickly is a very common symptom of one that’s reached the end of its life.
To find communities, use this:
https://lemmyverse.net/communities?query=thinkpad
Searching a Fediverse instance will only find communities that that instance knows about. This indexes all of them.
Are you using battery thresholds and keeping your laptop connected? There is a bug in ThinkPads, at least with my t480, in which the batteries get discharged over time but doesn’t get reported which causes the sudden power off. If you are using TLP I suggest you to either force a full charge or a recalibration to charge your battery properly. Also don’t discard the possibility of having a broken battery.
There are lots and lots of possible reasons for this to happen, so people will need some more information to help you find the issue.
Are you able to boot it at all after it shuts down? How often does it “randomly” get shut down? How do you determine your battery has 50% before it shuts down? Can you check if it happens on other operating systems? What does “it complains” mean, is it a warning in journalctl? Also, please post precise outputs of any errors you might see in journalctl at the time it shuts down.
I am using upower to determine the battery status. It happens once every day or so. It posts the messages in the tty as it shuts down. systemctl schedules the shutdown slightly ahead of time.
