[Resolved] Only Port 5 Charges | Ports 1,2,4 Do not charge

Framework Laptop 16
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Last night I encountered a strange issue where I thought my dGPU was being limited to 30W, but it turns out that the laptop simply wasn’t charging. I did some testing and found that the non-working ports (1,2,4) have 0A draw while only port 5 has an actual draw on it. I have no idea how or why this would happen. I tested both with and without expansion cards and saw the same result. Does anyone have ideas, or is this possibly an RMA issue?

System:

Framework 16 Ryzen 7 7840HS w/ RX 7700s

Fedora 42

BIOS 3.07 (stable)

The ports still work for usb, display out, and etc.

Thanks.

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Framework Laptop 16 Ryzen 7040 BIOS 3.07 Release STABLE
Issues with USB-C Ports Charging FW16
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Update: I tried a mainboard reset and that didn’t help.

Update #2: I was able to get the ports working again! Per a suggestion in another thread I disconnected the battery in bios and rebooted, which seems to have worked!

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Try reflashing the bios? Framework would be the best ones to ask, so put in a support ticket. But I think the firmware/bios has separate parts for each charging port. If those failed to update I could see them not working to charge.

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Just updated my previous comment, battery disconnect saved me :slight_smile:

Mods, please feel free to merge this post with the other one I linked. I did a naughty and arguably duplicated.

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There should be a different way to reset the EC unit onboard. Software based? Framework team - anything known that could be used?

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On a FW16, the EC can be reset with this proceedure:

  1. Power off the laptop, not suspend, power off.
  2. Remove the PSU (disconnect the power brick)
  3. Waited 120 seconds (its actually about 45 seconds from when the power light goes off and the brick is disconnected, but I say 120 seconds in case the laptop takes a while to switch off.
  4. This will power down the EC. I.e. reset it.
  5. Switch the laptop back on again will start the EC up again.

One way to tell if the EC is reset is to use “ectool console”. It has timestamps on it. If the timestamps start again with small values, your EC has been reset.

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Ports 1,2,4 are connects to one power rail.
Ports 3,4,5 are connected to a second power rail, so maybe you have a hardware fault with one of the power rails.

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That could certainly explain the pattern. I vaguely recalled hearing a detail like this before, so I was assuming there was something similar going on under the hood.

When you talk about resetting the EC, is the battery still plugged in?

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It does not matter if the battery is connected or not.
The EC reset procedure is the same.

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Fascinating. If this happens again I’ll try that (hopefully it doesn’t). Turn off, unplug, wait, turn on.

Just to provide another detail for future readers, Fedora/KDE did detect the AC connection and automatically activated my AC performance profiles when I was plugged into the bugged ports. This is part of why I had originally suspected that something had gone wrong with my dGPU under bios 3.07, as my device was still running with my AC mode scripts. Only a closer investigation showed that I was actually on battery.

[SOLVED]? FW 16 won't charge
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I can confirm that “shut down + disconnect + wait + connect” solution works.
Laptop was left suspended with the charger plugged in the morning, found it at 30% in the evening and not charging.
FW16 ryzen 7 ai 350 bios 3.04 – ubuntu 25.10

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I’ve been experiencing this issue since updating to BIOS 4.03 but shutting down and waiting for the EC to reset does not seem to be resolving this for me.

Interestingly while the official Framework 180W charger and any other USB-C PD chargers I have aren’t working, I have a Dell WD19S which it’ll happily charge with.

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As far as I know, you have to do a battery disconnect to get the port working again. I didn’t think a simple shut down worked for this issue. At least it doesn’t for me.

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You seem to be right. Doing the battery disconnect fixes this for a little bit (maybe a few hours?) for me and then it stops charging again.

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If it’s happening on it’s own without you connecting/disconnecting the cable, then there’s some other issue going on. Perhaps a bad connection, some fiber stuck in the port, or etc.

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Apologies, to clarify, once charging has started it works fine. However, the issue reocurrs after a while, such that starting a new charge gets stuck at 0W. Sometimes this is in as little as a few hours and sometimes it takes a few days. I’m collecting as much data as possible and then I’ll open a GitHub issue.

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When FW went from bios 3.x to 4.x, they also changed the USB-PD controller firmware over to a new code base. The chip manufacturer has re-written their code base.
So, although that new code base might be better, it has probably introduced bugs that were not present before.
I think FW are aware of some of the new bugs, so will get them fixed in time.

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I’m losing faith in that. 4.04 that was released last week made this issue worse for me. My bedside charger (100w) doesn’t even work at all anymore. Before, it worked most the time and only sometimes would stop charging. I haven’t been able to get it to work at all since going to 4.04.

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I hope that was in preparation to open sourcing it. Probably not but a man can dream.

Open source ec+open source pd controller could turn this platform into the most compatible/polished one over time.