ThinkPad T430: Getting rid of Lenovo's Battery Whitelist [READ DESCRIPTION] 

I got a Lenovo 27++ slice battery for my t430 when it should have been a 28++ (mine is a genuine Lenovo battery) would removing this whitelist also make the slice battery work?

Thank you so much for posting this video/tutorial! I was asked to repair my friend's Lenoxo X230 ThinkPad laptop, it needed a new cooling fan/thermal paste and the old battery was knackered (also showing a not official battery warning). The new battery works much better, but still refused to charge and came up with a non genuine warning. After installing Linux on a spare SSD I had (removing the customers' SSD to protect their data) and performing the required steps from this guide, everything now works perfectly and the battery charges up fine. (After which, I reinstalled their SSD - so they keep their files and I now have a test Linux drive as required.)

I was too scared of bricking my laptop to do this, but then I followed along with your video and now my computer is fixed. Thank you so much.

I confirm that the instructions worked perfectly for my Lenovo T430i. I just want to clear a confusion mentioned in the video for having a Genuine battery during the process. I think what was meant is to plug any battery with enough charge during the process to eliminate any risk during the BIOS flashing in case of power loss. Thank you for sharing this wonderful tool.

Thank you very much for this step by step guide. Sorry for the long post below but it may help someone in the future if I list the issues I faced when following this: To summarise: 1. If you want to use a new battery instead, make sure you get the 70++ genuine ones or higher 81+ as anything under that (even 70+) might not work. Also be aware of fake 'genuine' batteries. 2. If you follow the readme from the website make sure you do the extra step of turning the keyboard patches off and turning the battery patch on. 3. To avoid the catch 22 of Bios won't charge battery and empty battery won't allow bios update, see if you can use another laptop to charge the battery fully. 4. You can use another laptop to prepare the usb flash drive bios as long as it is running linux. 5. You can safely update the bios in future after you apply the patch. Bios from 2016 didn't need upgrading first to apply the patch. DETAILS: I bought a second hand t430 off ebay and was gutted when it came defective. Among the issues was the unsupported battery message at start. I followed your steps and am happy to report that everything worked great the 2nd time around (the first time I followed the readme file from the website and didn't turn OFF the keyboard patches and more importantly didn't turn ON the battery patch). Thank you for showing the extra step. My battery is a genuine lenovo 55+ battery and actually holds a good charge but is unsupported in the T430. I think the ones that are for this particular laptop are the genuine 70++ batteries or higher. With regards to updating the bios, I was able to fully charge the suspect battery in a T410 (since it has the exact same battery and doesn't have any problems with unsupported batteries). I was then able to flash the patch bios onto my bios firmware from 2016 (so a 2 year old bios works). I also carried out the whole preparation and USB creation procedure on the T410 which is running MX-15 linux (debian based) since my T430 has windows 7 on it, so using a different laptop worked for me too. Lenovo released a new bios in august 2018, so as a last step, I had a go at installing that through windows 7 (after I applied the patch) and it didn't affect the patch in any way (I lost sound for a second but upon reboot it works again).

Thank you man for sharing this with us. Just to note I did the update with the aftermarket battery and it also worked.

man this video reminds me of the laptops I bricked when I was tinkering BIOS for my previous laptops. but if it works without any issues , the accomplishment feeling when you get in the end is priceless! nice tutorial video , thanks man.

Thank you very much, sir, for helping out with this. I was able to fix the battery issue by upgrading bios from 2.72 to 2.81 and then modding it. Btw, my original battery was unable to keep any charge so I decided to flash BIOS mod being on my new third-party battery and it was a success.

Thanks a whole bunch mate! Finally got my 3rd party battery working. I was a bit stressed, quadruple checking everything XD. My machine is the thinkpad x230 and since the readme was based on this one, Most of the things I could copy and paste. Still checked to make sure though. Thanks again.

Man, I'm so grateful for that ! I thought I found the best deal with this laptop until my 3rd party 20€ batterie refused to charge...and discovered the price of a genuine one... With your hack, my 180€ T430 with brand new battery IS a deal ;-) Bless you Sebi

Great video and big thank you for your presentation. I had small problem because my T430 was on new bios but all finished good ( I mean: back to the older previouse BIOS ) and on the moment I have successful battery charging.

Thank you so damn much for this - recently bought a genuine 9 cell battery for my t430 - originally had a 6 cell battery and it came up with this error message!!! learned alot here thanks for the master class! now my t430 will take any battery no hassle! cheers bro!

Awersome, thanks for sharing

I bought a nine cells large accu for the t430 for 24 Euros only (new), in germany. Now I also need to patch the BIOS, thank you for the video. Greetings from sw germany.

I have to thank you for your video as well. I just bought what was supposed to be a w530 whitelist approved battery, and it turned out it wasn't accepted. A few minutes using the tools you linked to, as well as re reading the current instructions for selecting which patches I wanted, and the laptop is now happily charging the new pack. I did have a short but of worry that turned out to be a thing drive the BIOS didn't want to boot off of, but switching drives resolved that.

Thanks a million. Got the indicator to blink again on my X230 with a newly purchased X220 battery. The circuit on the older battery seem to have died, so I got some 18650 batteries out for something else.

Thanks for the great tutorial. I’ve got T430 & T530 to mod with this. For the record: a whitelist allows, a blacklist blocks. Lenovo is whitelisting a few batteries and blacklisting everything else. The end result is he same: modding the whitelist means that every battery that will fit will potentially work. It’s all about the terminology... Cheers.

Thank you Sebi! It worked for me. I followed step by step and now my "counterfeit Lenovo battery" is charging. T430 is ready to be my daily driver :)

Thank you very much, helped me to install and OEM t420 battery onto a t430, now charges well. t430's are just plain awesome. im lucky enough to get the Nvidia nvs5400 version too. with this mod and with a good battery finally working, I'm looking at installing a i7-qm down the line.

It worked for me :D. Thanks! (T430, version 2.76)

Thank you so much. It's working in my t430s laptop.

WOW, thank you so much. Works really great!

Thank you very much! Worked like charm on t430s.

These tutorials are priceless!!!

I confirm this today. It was working for a t430. I made th downgrade of the bios, and after flashed the bios. And it works. Thank you.

It worked for the T430 seriously thanks. We were having trouble for a week, my father could not attend live classes. If you want, I can also make the Turkish version for you.

I confirm that it is working on my 2, T-430 thinkpads. Original battery was needed for the bios update to v2.81. Created usb with ubuntu installed on ssd. The patch itself, booting from usb and flash, worked also with dead battery. Aftermarket batteries are charging after patch no error messanges. Thanks a lot

Worked on Lenovo T530. Thanks! I had an original Lenovo battery but an older gen and T530 refused to work with it. Also, I didn't even had to get a "original" battery for the bios flash - just remove the battery, plug the AC and it will let you flash the bios without the battery

God bless you, God tier tutorial. Thank you for help me to save some money

Thank you VERY MUCH for the video and the tutorial. I've bought a T430, Core i7, a few weeks ago, and it came with a supposedly original battery (it really seemed original), but the seller told me it wasn't charging. Strangely, the message that the battery was not original appeared each time I booted the computer. Then I bought a brand new 3rd party battery and the message remained. Worried about the situation I googled for a solution and found your video. Then I installed Linux (Ubuntu) as a dual boot system, followed the steps and voilà: no more "not original Lenovo Battery" messages. Then I swapped to the old battery (the original one), and it was not charging indeed. Maybe it's a faulty battery. An importante note, I guess: I made all the procedure with the 3rd party battery and it worked seamlessly as well. So maybe it is not mandatory to use an original Lenovo battery for the procedure. Thanks again, kind regards, Emmanoel Ferreira, from Brazil.

On the Lenovo EOL web database, the latest available BIOS version I could find for the T430 is 2.68 So how come you mention there is a 2.82 version ? Where did you find that?

Worked, thanks Seb :)

Thank you Mate! 20minutes of work and battery is being charged as it should. I owe you a beer :)

Thank you so much Sebastian, you save my new daughter's computer (Lenovo X230). Sébastien

This worked perfect on a T530 that had the battery issue. You have to go into the defconfig file in the root folder and change the config_battery parameter from n to y so the file looks like this: CONFIG_KEYBOARD = n CONFIG_BATTERY = y Then follow the instructions on the github site at the bottom...easier than what you did in this video.

Thank you so much from France sebi, it worked perfectly well on my x230 I owe you 100 dollars or a pint of beer as you prefer ;)

Thanks, I made this mod at 2 T430 and it worked :-)

I'm having an issue similar to someone else in the comments where the make patch commands don't actually change the patch files. I tried it on Arch, and now I'm doing it on a Lubuntu VM but the same thing is happening. Any clue how I can deal with this?

Hey Sebi, I did this perfectly - even got the second message. And yet, a brand new battery is still not being detected. It shouldn't be a problem with the battery because it did hold a charge when I bought it, but now obviously it is unable to be charged back up again. Something odd is that the patch files didn't actually change when I ran the make commands. I ran the commands, and then added .OFF manually. The final flash DID say that it was only flashing the patch I wanted though (battery). Besides those patches automatically changing, everything was the same as it was on screen. I'm so confused as to why this isn't working.

It is working! Thank you!

Thanx Sir. Gr8 vdo. Saved my day ..

I did it,many thanks,bro.

Thanks for the video. I'm a newbie to Linux, so I ran into a host of issues. First off I had to do a complete install of Ubuntu on a spare hard drive - I couldn't get this to work by running Ubuntu from a thumb drive. Once I had Ubuntu installed, the commands provided to turn off/on the patches wouldn't work for me (even using the SUDO command) - I figured out after several hours that I didn't have rights to the thinkpad-ec folder, nor could I change the rights. I had to create a new folder, grant myself the rights and copy the contents over to it. The commands to turn the patches on and off still didn't work. After the better part of a day I finally managed to create a thumb drive that upgrades the BIOS to 2.81, then after a reboot patches it to allow generic batteries to work (this is for the model T430 ONLY). I didn't mess with the keyboard patches because I don't need them. In any case, I created an image file of my thumb drive that I'd be happy to post somewhere to save everyone the hassle of having to do this themselves. Please don't get me wrong - I truly appreciate this video, but based on the comments I seem to be in the minority for those who struggled to get this to work.

Hello, i did everything you said and it went smoothly in ubuntu, the problem is after i restart the laptop and go to the boot menu and select the usb with patched bios, i get black screen for a second then it just goes back to boot menu, nothing seems to happen. What should i do? Ps, my bios version was 2.82 and i downgraded to 2.81 Edit, i managed to fix it by removing the number 1 at the end of " if=patched. t430.img of=/dev/sdc1" , but after installing the bios and restarting, the battery problem didn't get fixed.

I found that Windows 10 in my recent i7-X230 refurbished buy can figure out from the power saving options to clock the processor down, so it runs around 1.3-1.6 GHz while on battery. I just checked that the same applies for the T430. It might be relevant in stretching the battery life for some. Maybe there is other software for this and I would be interested in the Linux names.

Can this be done on a lenovo X131e? I tried to do this using the T230 flash but needless to say... it was a stupid idea. Luckily I didn't destroy my PC but now I know it didn't work

May i know the EC (at laptop, not the battery) is it part of biochip (physically) or its separate IC itself?

Hello ! Thank for your video ! I just did this and I have a question, if you still have the Laptop : what is the BIOS version after you install the patch ? Mine still shows 2.74, not 2.72 as it is written in the installer. Is there any way to know that it worked, other than testing with a third party battery ?

Thanks so much. it worked.

many thanks for this!

Is it modified bios of the Intel or the open source bios?

hello, in the last step when connecting the memory with the patch I just see the message "Missing operating system" instead of everything that appears in the minute 10:47

thanks so much, work fine t430

My laptop is L430. Do you have the whitelist BIOS because after I followed these steps, my laptop is not recognized the bios? Thanks

Hi , this is a fantastic tutorial. I wanted to know can this mod be done without using an original battery? I have a lenovo t530 with the same problem

HI, Thanks for sharing your knowlege on Thinkpads. Please can you tell us if what you did 3 years ago on this T430 is valid for the T430i model ? What do you think about the T430 with the NVS 5400m graphic card ? Best wishes

I have L530 with 9 cell battery (genuine) but I will need to replace it. Will 3rd party battery work on latest bios 2.76, ec ver 1.14 or if it wont could I just downgrade bios to older one if there is not any whitelist ?

Thanks for such useful video instruction. My T430 BIOS Version is 2.72 and I can't update it because I haven't OEM Battery. Can I do this flash?

Hi Sebi, do you know if the digital signature that blocks the whitelist mod also applies to the X2xx series?

I have a lenovo thinkpad t450 that won't charge a third party battery. Is the whitelist likely the issue? The bios version is 1.37...

I have been reviewing the battery and keyboard patches that I make for the Lenovo t430, however I have a Thinkpad E430c with a problem with the generic batteries, they do not charge due to the battery check just when loading the BIOS. There is a way to adapt the T430 patch to work with the E430c

I can confirm this works on a W530! A bit of a pain to unlock but the payoff is worthwhile. Make note to use git clone of the repo, don't download and extract it or part of the make process will fail.

what if you don't have the original battery anymore?

Thank You that was great!!

Hi, can I use your image file on my T430 to speed up the process? My T430 BIOS version is the last one (2.78), released yesterday by Lenovo. Congrats for the video!

I do not know if you would but would have to modify the bios to skip the password issue on the bios or remove it?

i follow everthing and boot into ubuntu linux then copy the patch to the formatted fat 32 usb 4gb but on booting up it shows missing operating system

Hi Sebi! Is it possible to do this patch on other models of laptops? I need to do it somehow on Lenovo Yoga 510, cuz it is turning of every 5min after upgrading the battery. Lenovo energy manager says, battery is not supported and (link forr the new one)

So cool!! Would this work for an updated L530? Sadly seems very difficult to downgrade..

i like thinkpad and i like your revew

Hi sebi. I have T430 thinkpad and bought an Msata SSD 256 kaizen. When i install the msata, it did not appear either on the disk managemen or in the bios. Do you maybe know what i did wrong? Or maybe t430 does not support msata?

Do you rename the file you have downloaded before? Mine named as thinkpae-ec-master

I’ve updated my T420 from Win7 to 10 and my nearly new aftermarket battery doesn’t work anymore. It shows that this battery is okay and capacity is also good but when I unplug charger it turns off. Any idea?

If I already installed 1vyrain bios mod, I can do this tutorial whithout brick the laptop?

Hi Sebi and thanks for such a great content, I became a thinkpad fan watching your videos multiple times. Is there a way to remove the battery whitelist, keyboard mod, and also for the wifi card at the same time? I tried Ivyrain and it helps remove the battery whitelist, but I can't get it to start with the new intel 7260 wifi card installed. I also want to install a new classic 7-row keyboard as well. I'm not really familar with the BIOS mod nor linux. Any advice would help~! Thanks~

Success on W530. For me "make patch_disable_keyboard clean" did not work, however editing the defconfig to set battery and keyboard to "y" and "n" respectively works great. Now I can use the battery from one of the ThinkPad Edge models. It's a genuine Lenovo battery, Lenovo is just being pricks.

i have a lenovo thinkpad t430 and the seller shipped it with a thinkpad t410 battery which is not original . After flashing this mod and why is it not working is it because of using thinkpad t410 battery?

For all the Thinkpad T 430 and T420 owners out there looking for a better screen much research on Panellook I have found and installed the Chimei Innolux N140FGE-LA2 with a 300 CD/M2 Luminance rating 50% greater than the lousy Lenovo Panels with a viewing angle of 45/45/20/45 a Contrast ratio of 650:1 which is awesome for a TN panel the correct LVDS connector in the right place taking the HD++ 1600 x 900 cable because this is a HIgh Res 1600 x 900 screen not the standard dog of a screen. It has the correct mounting holes screws straight in connects perfectly with the correcdt HD++ cable required for the HD++ spec screens and unlike the Lenovo X1Carbon TN screen which is better than stock but requires cable extensions to work or the very hard to find Alienware M14 X glossy TN panel which while good is a case of good luck finding one. The Innolux N 140-LA2 is available new and I just successfully fitted it have not yet calibrated the colors but it is already far better than the stock Lenovo Screen

hello i have t530 2.53 ver. its any problem if i updade with a patched battery ec 2.74 bios ?

Hi, Next question : is it possible to apply hamishColeman mod to bios modded by n4ru/1vyrain ? (I think to be based on 2.64 BIOS version for the T430/T430i)

I followed all the instructions up until I tried to change the configuration for enabling the battery fix, but Linux wouldn’t allow it. Always gives me an error

That looks like something that fixes my issue. One question though: Why do you need the original battery at all? Because the one I got is completely gone. Will it work with just the power supply plugged in? I don't think you mentioned anything about it needing the original during the process..only at the start? Thx

Hi Sebi! I have used this patch for my x230 and it worked great for a year. I recently made the error to update my BIOS to 2.77 and it does not work anymore. Do you know a tutorial to downgrade bios? I am under manjaro. Many thanks!

I have the T400 laptop and hope the battery I ordered will work on it because I don't know the condition of the battery which is already in the laptop. I am so glad to have Windows 10 off of it and ArcaOS installed and working fine. I don't want to be buying the Lenovo battery either and hope the one ordered will work just fine.

I ran the patch but after it reported success and rebooted i did not get the "flashing embedded controller..." Message. And it seems to not have been applied.

Thank you. It worked

I just read the video name and description... Is there anyway to do the same with wifi cards?

Is there a patch that works similar to this to allow differnt wifi cards? or are hard mods the only option for that

Can you do a video on rebuilding these battery packs? I have a T60 battery but it doesn't hold much charge. I'm wondering if buying the actual cells and soldering them would be a better option than buying a new one. It's a 57WH battery, FRU 42T4621

What about L430, it is not listed on GitHub. Is there any way I could unlock it to support third party aftermarket battery? Cheers

Hi Sebi, I'm not experienced with linux and I'm affraid to make something wrong, whtat might result bricking my laptops. Do you have ready to download, altready modified, bios BIOS 2.81 (G1ETC1WW) EC 1.13 (G1HT35WW) for T430 and BIOS 2.75 (G2ETB5WW) EC 1.14 (G2HT35WW) for X230? Thanks in advance!

Fantastic!!! Really awesome!! Thanks... but no E530 notebook(((

Is there any way to do the same thing on an E531? Older model, was forced to buy a 3rd party replacement and it won't charge, it's driving me crazy. Thank You.

Can this bios mod work for L430, as it uses same 70+ or 70++ battery like T430, and is of same time period (2012)?

Would you know if i have any chance with my Lenovo M5400 (model name 80B5)? Unfortunately the same battery problem...

Hello, I was going to follow the steps in your video with my W530, but when I entered github I saw this notice: COMPATIBILTY WARNING: As the result of CVE-2019-6171, newer Lenovo firmware update files have added a digital signature. If you upgrade to locked version you will not be able to patch your EC without downgrading it. but in the video you explain that to be able to do it you need to have the bios to the newest version. What do you recommend me to do then? thank you

thank you sebi !

Thanks Sebi, it’s 2021 and I am buying a 2nd T430 and need to do this! The genuine Lenovo batteries on ebay are around $50 for 9 cell, but I suspect they may be non OEM. So I cllicked the link and it went to a bunch of files..... do I follow the directions at the bottom of the page? Doing this in Ubuntu 20.04.

Nice video my friend, is there any chance you can do it on x1 carbon ? It's really pain in the ass, i cant use after market battery

Hi, I have a ThinkPad L430. I do not have an original battery and I receive error message from start an popup message after boot. Any chance to fix my machine to run with a non genuine battery?