Comment 31 for bug 1194563

Ugh. I downloaded and tested the ISOs for Maverick and Lucid (10.04.4 version) and was met with the same results I had with Natty (also had to use nomodeset to boot). Neither recognized the battery (including a boot to Lucid on battery only). I know for certain when I had Lucid, the battery was recognized and charge status was reported. Note: battery was recognized on the Oneiric ISO but failed to update status (like Precise).

There is no acpi on any of the ISOs (maybe affected battery recognition?) and I know I've always had to make sure the nvidia drivers are current on any distro (otherwise get xorg errors on boot) and probably why I have to use the nomodeset option on the ISO boot. However, I doubt the nvidia card/driver would affect the battery recognition on the boots.

Maybe it is some hardware issue with the battery but when I use the boot to Win7 (32 bit), Windows does report and update the battery's charge status. While trying to search for some more answers, I came across this:
http://askubuntu.com/questions/35102/battery-not-recognized-on-my-laptop-and-it-recognizes-my-laptop-as-a-desktop

The last comment notes: "If you run windows ever, Windows can change your battery settings (somehow) and make it unreadable by some linux distros."

As the machine is a dual Ubuntu/Win7 boot option, I wondered if Win7 screwed something up, so I booted to Win7 and put the power settings to defaults. It still didn't fix the problem. I wonder if there is a hardware issue that coincided with the update to Precise or if a Win7 update related to power management messed something up (also coinciding with the upgrade to Precies).

Let me know what else I can troubleshoot to isolate the problem. (Thanks so much for the help so far!)