William Shallum

Snow Leopard & Macbook Battery Updater 1.4

Posted Apr 10 2010, 16:29 by William Shallum [updated Jul 5 2011, 15:44]

Macbook Battery Updater 1.4 installation fails on Snow Leopard. Simple fix: edit BatteryUpdate.1.4.dist inside the .pkg (copy it to someplace writable first) and comment out the version checking parts. See this post for details.

NOTE: check the Battery Updater page to see if your battery needs the update. Mine had Pack Lot Code 0002 and Firmware Version 0110.

After getting installed, it still won’t load. It installs a bundle /System/Library/SystemConfiguration/BatteryUpdater.bundle, but this is 32bit only and configd won’t load it.

How to update manually:
run /System/Library/SystemConfiguration/BatteryUpdater.bundle/Contents/Resources/BatteryFlasher -bu14

The -bu14 (found after tracing with gdb) parameter is important otherwise nothing happens and it exits with exit code 1. This updater is supposed to log things to syslog but I guess I don’t have the LOG_INFO level enabled so I can’t see it. The only thing visible in syslog is the LOG_NOTICE message saying “Battery updated by BatteryUpdater vers 1.4”.

After updating, my Pack Lot Code was changed to 0003. Nice.