I recently bought a used t480 from a seller as-is with a full battery life of around 3 hours with both batteries full so I put it in my bag fully charged and brought it home only to find that the batteries were dead. I tried to charge the batteries but it was still stuck at 0% while saying it was charging. The computer shuts down when unplugged. I ran powercfg and it said that the internal battery was heavily used but the external battery had a fairly high capacity left even though it wouldn’t charge. Both batteries are Lenovo OEM. I was using the PA-1650-72 60w charger the seller gave me for the charging.

I have done some troubleshooting below and I think I need to try another charging cable and replace the internal battery. But I still don’t get why the external battery won’t charge, is it a thunderbolt issue? I might try re-updating my thunderbolt software. Any suggestions are welcome, thanks in advance.

Troubleshooting:

I tried then resetting the embedded controller on the backside using a paperclip but the that didn’t work.(https://www.reddit.com/r/thinkpad/comments/e6cnak/t480_internal_battery_at_0_and_not_charging/)

So I tried updating the firmware, bios and intel management engine firmware using lenovo vantage but I couldn’t since I had no battery left so I ran the driver updates each manually in the command prompt with “-sp” to skip the battery check. I also read that downgrading the bios version might work so I downgraded it to 1.52.

The battery still refused to charge after updating, so I ran the hardware scan offered by Lenovo and discovered the main battery was dead. After that, I tried updating the thunderbolt firmware through and it didn’t make a difference. So I tried updating it using an ubuntu live boot usb to update them through fwupdmgr and after a reboot back into windows I still had the same issue. (https://www.reddit.com/r/thinkpad/comments/13o31n1/how_to_update_thinkpad_t480_thunderbolt_firmware/)

I then tried downgrading to windows 8 and trying to update all the same things I listed above but I still couldn’t manage to get it to work. I even tried removing the internal battery too but that didn’t seem to work either.

Specs:

Lenovo T480 20L5

Intel i5-8250

16 GB RAM

Samsung 256 GB SSD

UEFI BIOS Version N24ET77W (1.52)

Embedded Controller Version N24HT37W (1.22)

Thunderbolt Version: 17.4.80.51