Big problems after Mountain Lion install

Here´s a thread I started on iFixit.com

Erratic "Battery Charging /Not charging"

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Ever since I did a Mountain Lion update I´ve had various troubles with battery power. I reverted to Snow Leopard after installing an SSD and the issue did not go away. The indicator was saying "Replace battery". Immediately before the ML attempt my battery was showing 91% capacity, after the upgrade it started telling me to replace the battery!

So I bought an original Apple battery and replaced it. It seemed to work fine for some weeks but has now started saying "Not charging" sometimes. Coconut Battery if left open changes from charging to not charging. I checked for bad connections to the battery but that seems to be OK.

Is this a firmware issue caused by the Mountain Lion installation I did earlier on the original hard disk? Is there a solution?

Colin P

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This happened to me when replacing the battery on a MacBook A1181. The battery was new, was charging fine but it says "Replace battery". I did a restart and reset parameter and reset SMC. I did a couple of complete drain/charge of the battery. No more error messages. I trust Coconut Battery more than OSX :-)

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT3964

Thanks for that. I have already done all the things you mention and more. I didn´t mention in my question that "Disk Utility" found serious corruption on my internal SSD. I booted from Snow Leopard Installer DVD and ran "Repair Disk", which fixed a whole bunch of errors but the problems persisted even after running "Disk Warrior" which also fixed a whole bunch. Machine ran normally for about 1 day but my first attempt to start up from battery failed. NEXT I erased the internal SSD and used Carbon Copy Cloner to transfer my CCC backup to it. This stabilised things quite a lot. I am still in the process of power cycling the machine multiple times. Will report back when I´m convinced everything is OK. BTW I trust CCC more than Apples "Time Machine".

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It seems it WAS Firmware! I re-installed the Mountain Lion HD in the Laptop. Downloaded the latest Combo update and ran it. Apple website says the combo is 600 or so MB but over 800 actually got downloaded. SNEAKY? Whatever the Snow Leopard SSD is back in place now and everything works just fine.

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I'm having the same problem, sometimes it shuts down from nothing while on battery and other times it runs ok. The battery is new, replaced one week ago.

Now it's charging properly. I'm hating SMC and updates.

Edited by: bbelcastro( 7 days ago )

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You don´t mention which system version you are running or which model your machine is. I think this is highly relevant.

Two days ago this issue returned on my MBP 5,5 (mid 2009 13"). I am not interested in "Mountain Lion" and as I wrote above I went to a lot of trouble to revert to "Snow Leopard", which IMHO is the best ever Mac OS for my purposes.

I forgot to mention that not only the "Battery not charging" warning was coming and going but also the "Time & date" settings were lost every time the problem occurred.

Once again I re-installed my hard disk with ML into the machine, downloaded

the 10.8.2 "Combo update" and ran it. Everything was back to normal. This time the dmg that came down was the size that was stated on the download page at Apple.com.

Then swapped out the internal drive back to the SSD with "Snow Leopard".

Booted the machine from my CCC backup disk (in a USB box) and was able to repair the corrupted SSD. Booted back to SSD and everything looked good.

All that took place yesterday, today I booted without power supply or internet connection and the problem was back. In fact the machine switched itself off after 10 minutes. Did a SMC, was able to start but "Disk utility"found the SSD to be corrupt again. Back to my, non-corrupted CCCbackup, repaired the SSD.

As I write this, the "not charging" is coming and going all the time. I´m booted from the CCC backup.

So, to summarize ....

This HAS to be firmware trouble. It´s directly related to upgrading my original system HD to Mountain Lion, the issue began immediately after the install. Apple is kind of "in denial" of this issue AFAIK.

Please specify which Machine you have.

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All comments welcome, especially from an APPLE employee !!! I am FURIOUS.

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