Odd Acer 8951G Battery Issue

The hard drive in my Aspire Ethos 8951G recently failed, and my solution was to simply replace it with the hard drive from an identical unit which had stopped working months earlier. (The drive in question is set up to dual boot between Windows XP Pro and Windows 7, if that makes a difference.)

What's odd here is that the battery doesn't seem to want to work now. I know it's a good battery because it worked fine before I replaced the hard drive. I can get it to work now only in brief spurts by doing the following:
1) Remove the logic door
2) Unplug the battery from the motherboard
3) Reconnect the battery to the motherboard (whether or not I hold the power button down doesn't seem to make a difference here)
4) Replace the logic door and flip the orange switch but *do not* replace the screws

I can turn the computer back over, boot into Windows 7, restart into XP, shut down, reboot, do anything I want while running off the battery. I can plug in and then unplug, no problem. I've tested just about every scenario you can think of, and every time only one factor seems to make the battery stop working: just when I think everything is fine, I flip the computer back over, and replace the screws in the logic door. As soon as the screws are back in place, the battery stops working, and both installations of Windows show no battery detected.

I don't know of any reason why that should make the difference, but it does, every time. Any ideas how to solve this?

 

Sounds like the screws might be shorting something. Maybe something has moved once you were replacing the HDD and now the screw closes the circuit every time it's screwed in.
Open the notebook properly and try to assemble it carefully. If there was something that you didn't put in this time (like one of those weird plastic covers that go on HDDs in some notebooks) - make sure it is installed too.

Also make sure that you are using the correct screws - not ones that are too long. These sometimes end up reaching too far and touching something they shouldn't and causewaying a short circuit.