Sudden shutdown, battery from full to zero charge in the blink of an eye

[jObooW]

Hi all,

I own a mid-2010 15" MacBook Pro. Today I was using it with the adapter connected, battery at full charge. Out of nowhere, it shutdown instantly. I could not turn it back on, and the battery indicator leds just flashed once really short when checking the battery. Still, the magsafe indicator had its green led lighted.

I disconnected all peripherals including the adapter. Still wouldn't start. I reconnected the adapter and it automatically booted. After logging in, another instant shutdown. I manually started it again. This time it kept working, just as if nothing had happened.

EXCEPT, the battery was now fully discharged. My technical knowledge tells me this is impossible to happen in the blink of an eye without setting anything on fire, but hey, I could be wrong. I can't find any odd console logs or any other odd behavior, so it must be hardware related. Is the battery slowly giving up on me?

iStat Pro tells me the battery is at 93% health after 308 cycles, and it has always performed perfectly well in the past.

A quick search around the web didn't help me, so I'm asking for your help. Could the battery be dying any day now? Should I replace it to prevent it from damaging other internals? Could it be firmware related?

Any advice is appreciated!

PS: The battery did start charging again, happening as you read.

 

[Barney63]

Maybe a fuse has gone in the battery circuit. I'm sure one of the techies will advise.

Barney

 

[jObooW]

Maybe a fuse has gone in the battery circuit. I'm sure one of the techies will advise.

I did not note this at first, but the battery has started charging again as usual. This wouldn't happen if a fuse had blown, correct?

 

[Barney63]

I did not note this at first, but the battery has started charging again as usual. This wouldn't happen if a fuse had blown, correct?

I wouldn't think so

Barney

 

[jObooW]

Any other thoughts on this?

 

[laurihoefs]

Any other thoughts on this?

You are correct, there's really no way a full battery could completely dischare in a blink of an eye. Ok, technically the battery exploding would release all its stored energy that quickly, but I would not call that discharging

One explanation could be that for some reason your battery and charging status were reported incorrectly, and in fact your computer was running on battery power. Could just be a harmless glitch which an SMC reset might solve.

I would recommend running Apple Hardware Test from the gray CDs/DVDs that came with your computer. If the AHT extended test does not find anything out of the ordinary, a bug/glitch in SMC is a very likely explanation, IMHO.

False battery readings could make the SMC go haywire and could also be a symptom of a the battery going bad.

 

[happyfrappy]

From experience on my 2010 13" MBP, one of the "cells" failed so a near discharge(20%) it had a sudden shutdown and upon charged up it kept showing full capacity with a "battery check" error... when I drained close to 20% it would power off. My power adapter failed with a capacitor goo leaking too so I was stuck making a Genius appointment.

End result I went to an Apple Store, sure enough the battery "failed" as the cycles were abnormally low(half of Coconut Battery) when they ran a system test. First "Genius" who handled the test/notes estimated most MBP batteries last ~4 years and wasn't surprised.