IBook sometimes boots on battery power

I recently inherited an 800MHz iBook G3 that has been acting strangely. Its internal hard drive was shot (it made loud clicking noises) but I got it to boot off an external firewire HD. The machine works great when plugged in to AC power, but acts very strangely when on battery power. It wouldn't boot on battery power, but if the iBook was running I could unplug the adapter and sometimes the iBook would run for a while and then shut off and other times it would immediately shut off (the battery was 100% charged).
I replaced the internal HD, hoping somehow it would solve my problem, but it didn't. I have done some more experimenting and it seems if I have had the iBook plugged in to AC power for a while (like overnight), the ibook will boot on battery power and run anywhere from 10 seconds to a minute before powering completely down. After that, the machine is completely dead and I have to plug it in to AC power to get it to boot again. Also, when it reboots, the time is messed up. I get an error message that says "Your computer's clock is set to a date before March 24th 2001. This may cause some applications to behave erratically. Please use the ..."
I have reset the PRAM and PMU repeatedly, I have tried other batteries (and while none of them were new they worked in other ibooks) with the same result. I also tried my battery in another ibook and it booted and ran that ibook just fine. Something in my ibook just shuts it down. I get some sort of system halt call in the log file.
I'm at a loss... anybody have any ideas as to what could be wrong or what I can do to fix it? Thanks for the help.

Hey JW.
Well like SU says:
"It sounds like there is a bad connection between the battery and the computer. "
So what I have seen on these is a bent locking tab on the battery lock. I had a few in here like that. I could lift the iBook 1" when it was running on battery and if I dropped that small bit it would shut down. Bending the locking tab back solved the problem. Careful it's fragile.
Also like Rhonda says it could be a logic board problem.
I've seen the super capacitors on the G3s go bad. Typically it's a .22 Farads @ 5.5 VDC. What happens is that the cap blows up (probably due to over filling like in the classic cases of cap failure in the past). It's easy to see since the outer case gets peeled back.
If you're date and time is constantly messed up I'd suspect that. I've replaced those caps with ones I bought from Electronics Goldmine.
Since that cap holds settings on the PMU it would also affect power if there were small transients that could cause you problems. The super cap system is designed to hold settings for around 30 seconds while you change batteries but if that cap is dead it wouldn't hold settings for a millisecond.
Richard

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So I have seen this issue posted in other topics but nowhere have I seen an answer so I thought I would start a new thread. Actually I have two issues.
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I have tried resetting the PRAM and I have re-calibrated my battery, neither of these things seems to have helped. I have lost some work with this so I really want to figure it out. Any ideas on how to make this stop?
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I really was hoping to be able to get closer to 5 hours of work time out of the battery. One of the reasons that I went with the ibook instead of the powerbook was for the longer battery life.
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1. Resetting the PMU should take care of it.
2. Here are a few tips to maximize battery life.
A. Lower the brightness to about 5 or 6 bars.
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