Removing battery without disabling in BIOS

[wookey]

Anyone know what the risk is with removing the battery on a P1 Gen3 without first disabling the internal battery in the BIOS? What might break?

[RealBlackStuff]

As long as the machine is not in 'sleep' modus (i.e. fully shut down), there should be no problem whatsoever.
Just be careful not to break the battery-socket and/or -cable.

[wookey]

OK. Well I didn't read the instructions properly so I took the back off and the battery out (had to look at a video to see how that super-flat connector worked as it's not obvious) without disabling the battery in the bios first. (I've taken a lot of laptops to bits and 'change stuff in the BIOS first' is a new one on me. The machine was hard-powered-down with the power button held for 10 secs so I'm reasonably sure that's properly 'off'.

However on reassembly the battery just read 0%. The machine would still run on the battery so it was still working electrically but the battery state was no longer readable.
I thought maybe it needed to resync with the battery to get a percentage so I let it run on battery for a while. After letting it discharge on battery power it's still not charging. A little charging symbol is shown along with 0% (for more than a day now).

I'm not sure how to proceed to work out what's actually wrong. It there a hardware problem or some kind of software resync needed?

I'm reasonably sure I didn't do any damage to the connector, but I've not tried beeping it out yet to check that all 7 pins are connected.

[MikalE]

Now you have found out "what will break" if you attempt to remove the battery improperly.

Were you not able to access the BIOS to disable the battery?