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.
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.
Here a picture of the screen I get before it shuts down.
I use Fedora on my T470 with no issues. It might just be Arch. Have you tried other distros? I wish there was a ThinkPad community here.
I also use Fedora on a 2008 Mac Pro with no issues. I’m really surprised how good it is because I’ve been using Linux since the 90s and never had it just run smoothly on my older hardware.
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.
