I have a Compaq Armada M300 laptop running Ubuntu Linux 5.10, and I can’t get it to run off the battery. The battery indicator always reads full, but I can’t boot without the AC cord plugged in, and if I remove the cord while the laptop is running, the machine dies.
Wait, it gets weirder. The first time I plugged in my Cisco Wireless PCMCIA card–before I set up any of its configuration or drivers–the battery indicator reset to zero, and slowly recharged over the next 90 minutes. The system still couldn’t run off the battery, but it clued me in that perhaps something rather serious was wrong.
I had a troubled install of Ubuntu on this machine–video driver issues that had me doing parts of it without benefit of the screen–so I really don’t know if I screwed something up in the software, or if my hardware has gone bad. It could be I’ve knotted up the APCI somehow, or that my battery is just plain toast.
How do narrow down the cause of my woes as hardware vs. software, and if it is software, how do I solve the issue?