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ericssonboi · Sep 1, 2006, 11:39 PM

Has anyone hot swapped their MBP battery?

Well my second battery came into and i hot swapped my battery.
I took out the dead battery while in sleep mode. The sleep mode went out and i quickly put in the fully charged battery in.

Once the new battery was in, i tapped on the keyboard and it came back up.
The screen came back up in a dimmed out grey screen with a progress bar on the bottom showing you that it was coming up.

So then it loads up.. and it shows the indicator.. BUT everything is very slow.
I'm getting beachballs...

So simple.. I restart the system..
I'm at the startup (Grey screen, apple logo, spinning circle), and it stays there.

I reset PRAM.. and still nothing.

Boot from CD that came with the system.. I go into Utility Disk..
And it sees the drive after a while..

I try to repair the disk, UNREPAIRABLE.
I try to repair permissions, no luck.

I'm bringing it in for service.. anyone experience anything similar?

Cadaver · Sep 2, 2006, 01:02 AM

Sounds like it may have died before swapping the battery, or perhaps you banged it before the machine had finished writing data to the drive. I've swapped batteries several times while the machine was in sleep mode without incident. Its designed to be possible to do.

Sorry for your troubles, but I suspect its not a result of swapping the battery.

ericssonboi · Sep 2, 2006, 02:13 AM

Thanks for the reply..
Then it might have been something wrong before..

The drive won't mount now.. so i'm thinking it might be a faulty hard drive.

Daniel Bayer · Sep 5, 2006, 05:13 PM

Hot swapping and sleep / wake-up used to be one of the most impressive things about the Powerbook / Mac portable line. It was pretty much instant and incredibly reliable.

Now it is utterly pathetic. There is nothing more embarrassing than having to wait half a minute for the HD to spin down after closing the lid or having to re-boot after swapping batteries when working with clients.

And how cute! Today I thought I would listen to some music with my Apple brand head phones in a cafe while I work. Now the cute little red L.E.D. won't go off so now I have no audio. Just ****ing great as I really need to hear the "swoosh" of my sent email so I don't have to baby sit the damn thing while getting other work done.

I swear Apple, one more thing and this is going on Ebay!!

tintin220 · Sep 5, 2006, 05:26 PM

Why not just shut down before swapping the battery? It takes the most of half a minute.

Cadaver · Sep 5, 2006, 09:43 PM

Originally Posted by Daniel Bayer

Hot swapping and sleep / wake-up used to be one of the most impressive things about the Powerbook / Mac portable line. It was pretty much instant and incredibly reliable.

Now it is utterly pathetic. There is nothing more embarrassing than having to wait half a minute for the HD to spin down after closing the lid or having to re-boot after swapping batteries when working with clients.

And how cute! Today I thought I would listen to some music with my Apple brand head phones in a cafe while I work. Now the cute little red L.E.D. won't go off so now I have no audio. Just ****ing great as I really need to hear the "swoosh" of my sent email so I don't have to baby sit the damn thing while getting other work done.

I swear Apple, one more thing and this is going on Ebay!!

The 10 second hard drive delay is the Safe Sleep system; its writing your memory contents to the hard drive, and the more RAM you have, the longer it takes. You can turn this off, after which shutting the lid induces instant sleep just like on previous PowerBooks. There's a short command you type in to the terminal to turn it off. Can't recall it offhand, so do a search.

What red LED are you talking about? The LED for the optical audio out? That'll turn itself on when running Win XP via Boot Camp (there's an Apple tech doc about this). You can turn it off by going to the XP sound control panel and turning off digital audio out.

Daniel Bayer · Sep 5, 2006, 10:49 PM

I'm not running XP, this is an OSX only machine. One more little thing to drain my battery and cause heat...

Simon · Sep 6, 2006, 02:54 AM

Originally Posted by Daniel Bayer

I'm not running XP, this is an OSX only machine. One more little thing to drain my battery and cause heat...

Yes, thank you. We'll now cry together.

Rather than whining here, just do a search on this board or google for how to turn off the optical audio output. Jee wiz.

amazing · Sep 6, 2006, 09:20 AM

In the PB line, there was an internal battery that had sufficient juice to power the PB during the short duration of a battery switch. If you waited way too long, the internal battery would go dead and you'd lose whatever wasn't saved.

Safe sleep is something different, in that you have to wait for the RAM contents to be saved to the HD. When you take the battery out, the MB or MBP powers off (loses power, actually.)

How to swap the MacBook Pro battery

The more RAM you have, the longer it takes to write to disk, hence the longer wait. Also, there's the hidden penalty of additional HD space withdrawn from user storage, namely the RAM size plus about 750 MB.

Some people love this feature, others hate it (and hate losing the HD space.) Here's the instructions and the whole discussion:

How to Safe Sleep (Hibernate) Your Mac - AndrewEscobar.com