MBP 2012 crashing if the battery dies while it's sleeping.

[WarmWinterHat]

My battery drains over a day or two when my 2012 (non-retina) MBP is closed and suspended. If the battery dies, it crashes when it wakes back up. I've tried a new SSD, went back to stock ram, reset NVRAM and SMC, reinstalled a couple times. It's 100% stable in every other situation and sleeps/wakes under other circumstances; when plugged in, if I wake it before the battery dies. Could it be my battery? Coconut shows it as good.

 

[Taz Mangus]

When you say "when plugged in" are you referring to the MBP plugged into the power adapter and charging with the lid closed? When you did a reinstall did you do an erase and install?

 

[WarmWinterHat]

That's what I mean.

I did erase and reinstall. Repartitioned and formatted the drive.

 

[Honza1]

One thing to try is to shut down MBP and let is sit shut down for the two days. Then start up and see, how much the battery discharged. If it is more than 5-10% (there is some discharge even when not in use) the battery may be have high self discharge current. In that case new battery may help. If the battery does not self discharge significantly, it may be MBP hardware itself as it looks like you already wiped and reinstalled the system. One would hope that would fix any sleep issues.

 

[Taz Mangus]

That's what I mean.

I did erase and reinstall. Repartitioned and formatted the drive.

So you are saying that when the computer is plugged in and charging it still looses battery charge? That is the impression I got from your post:

when plugged in, if I wake it before the battery dies.

 

[WarmWinterHat]

So you are saying that when the computer is plugged in and charging it still looses battery charge? That is the impression I got from your post:

No, I should have worded that better.

If it's plugged in, everything is fine, awake or sleeping. It charges fine. If it's unplugged, closed and sleeping and the battery dies, it crashes when starting back up.

If it's fully charged with lid closed, suspended and the charger is disconnected (white light slowing blinking on the front), it will last about 1.5-2 days before the battery dies.

 

[WarmWinterHat]

One thing to try is to shut down MBP and let is sit shut down for the two days. Then start up and see, how much the battery discharged. If it is more than 5-10% (there is some discharge even when not in use) the battery may be have high self discharge current. In that case new battery may help. If the battery does not self discharge significantly, it may be MBP hardware itself as it looks like you already wiped and reinstalled the system. One would hope that would fix any sleep issues.

Interesting. I will try that.

The battery is old, as you can see from the Coconut screenshot. MacOS hasn't gave me a service warning yet, though, despite it having close to 900 cycles.

 

[WarmWinterHat]

Late update. It's a Catalina problem.

I don't know what's causing it, but I downgraded to Mojave and everything is fixed. I reinstalled on a freshly formatted drive with Catalina and the problem comes right back....

No idea where to go from here except to hang out on Mojave, which I'm doing for now. Maybe the patched Big Sur version that people on this forum are working on will fix it...maybe not..Clearly it's a Catalina bug and no amount of reporting it to Apple does anything.

 

[Honza1]

Late update. It's a Catalina problem.
...
No idea where to go from here except to hang out on Mojave, which I'm doing for now. Maybe the patched Big Sur version that people on this forum are working on will fix it...maybe not..Clearly it's a Catalina bug and no amount of reporting it to Apple does anything.

Well, Mojave will be supported for quite some time. And it is 2012 machine, keep it on Mojave until retired.
To be fair to Apple, they may not be able to fix this even if they wanted (which for 2012 system is questionable). It is possible Catalina is using hardware differently than Mojave and this specific system happens to have some fault which shows when used using Catalina method. They surely tested Catalina on all supported systems and it passed, this is something they would figure out by now themselves or from users if it was common. So it has to be relatively rare. In this case you are unlucky the system fails under Catalina, but lucky it at least works well under Mojave.