How can I recover a bum battery?

[Mikus Grinbergs]

I'm asking for assistance - I now have two batteries for which the
Battery LED will not light (stays dark) when AC power is plugged in.
[With a good battery, that LED does light up green, as it should.]  At
$25 each, I don't want to just toss the bum batteries.

These "state changes" happened during "normal operation" (under AC
power) on an XO-1 with q2e43 and os13 (manually updated with the latest
available RPMs).  Previously, the Battery LED had been green.  When I
noticed it later, it was dark.  [I remember that just prior to noticing
the second failure, I had done a Sugar restart with <ctl-alt-erase>.]

In my specific case, wiki.laptop.org/go/XO_Troubleshooting_Battery is
not helpful enough.  [Results before/after 'batman-start' are not
similar; results (after 'batman-start') with 'see-bstate' DO seem
similar with either good or bum batteries (numbers don't cycle);
'ec-abnormal@' tells 0.]  I gather that the EC has trouble talking to
the bum battery, perhaps because of bad EEPROM data.  [The bum batteries
have enough power to run the (different) XO-1 I am testing them on.]

If they have bad EEPROM data, how can I recover those batteries ?


Thanks,  mikus