Lenovo Third Party Battery Lockout

Support
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1

Mod-edit: Removed potentially dangerous link info’s to protect later readers

Hi, guys

I really hope you can help me with this one. I have this laptop:

Lenovo M5400
Intel Core i5-4200M
GeForce 740M
8 GB RAM
BIOS Version 2.03 (this will be relevant later)

I bought a 3rd party battery for it, and after boot it says that because the battery
is not a legit lenovo product it wont charge.
I kinda live in a ■■■■■■■■ country, even this 3rd party one was considerable expense,
buying genuine lenovo is not an option.
I found this video on the issue:

/watch?v=removed

The github site has modified bios images from what I understand to bypass this issue:

(removed)

However there is no listing for my laptop.
I wouldn’t be surprised if mine shared the BIOS with one of the listed laptops
but I can’t figure out if thats the case or not.
Also it lists multiple BIOS versions that are considered “good” for this hack
Mine is several versions behind, however the newest versions won’t work at all.
What can I do?
I don’t want to go for some “pull out the battery, wait 5 secs, press on button for 10,
plug original battery in, plug ac adapter in, replace battery, do a raindance” type of
“solution” for this.

This is kinda urgent I need this battery working for school.

Any ideas?

Thank you all in advance.

2

Never experiment with bios hacks - you may end up regretting it deeply.

Do not play with the system firmware!

5

What @linux-aarhus is trying to tell you is that when you download shady firmware you might be setting yourself up for your computer to be hacked from a firmware perspective. Lately there have been more and more UEFI exploits that run above the OS level and is one of the ways of completely owning your machine even if running Linux. (and not only by the ФСБ or CIA: also criminal organisations post things like this in the hope that users will download and install them)

So basically your cure is worse than the disease.

so the answer to your question:

is:

Tell the teacher / professor and ask to be seated close to the electricity outlet used for cleaning the classroom. They will understand!

:+1:
P.S. Back in the BIOS days, I’ve patched BIOSes myself using ASM code but nowadays it’s just way too dangerous to download stuff like this from the net without clear instructions on how to do the patching yourself.