Silver Cartridge Lost Save - Pokemon Save Battery Question

[white shard]

I'm new to gameboy repairs and replaced a save battery of a pokemon silver cart i've been dying to play for a while. However, on my commute this morning, i tried to boot it up when it wouldnt advance past the booting screen with the gameboy logo. no issue. took it out, put it back in, loaded up the cart, and the save i was working on was gone.

does anyone know what might be going on? i just restarted the game and the battery still hold saves and the clock still works. it feels like something on the circuit was overloaded and just died for long enough to erase my progress.

[finite canopy]

Please remember to provide as much information as possible including all troubleshooting steps you have already taken. If this is a hardware issue, please provide clear in-focus images of the issue, PCB (circuit board), installation, and any soldering you have done. Help us help you, posts with insufficient information will be deleted

[dreamy cliff]

Are these bridged?

[white shard]

hmmmmm i cant tell with just my eyes. i dont have a microscope/multimeter at my apartment, but i can check tomorrow.

it doesnt look like it's shorted

One thought I just had, that I don't know the veracity of, is whether or not the solder I did on the battery was sufficient. I just had the thought that it could have potentially lost electrical connectivity for a short moment and then reconnect, wiping the save data but allowing for more saves.

One other sort of important point I should say is that I usually walk with my gameboy to work, and it's current quite cold where I am right now. Could thermal effects also be confounding it?

[dreamy cliff]

Where did you get your batteries? Also, I highly suggest getting a multimeter to test the battery voltage. If it’s not saving, you could have a dud but no real way to tell without a multimeter. You could swap the battery again though.

[white shard]

I bought the batteries off of amazon. And yeah, I left my personal multimeter in my lab earlier today, so I don't have it currently.

And it is saving, that's the part that confuses me. I just created a new save file and it is still holding.

[dreamy cliff]

If the battery is bad; sometimes it’ll still save but the save will disappear at some point. Let us know once you can check the battery voltage and we can see if that can be ruled out.

[white shard]

I will update tomorrow with better pictures and a multimeter reading. For the sake of comparison when I send that info tomorrow, the voltage of the battery was measured to be 3.3V when I first installed it.

[stoic apex]

Your battery contacts might not be making great contact with the pads on the cart. It looks like on the negative side in particular it’s lifted and kind of floating in the solder instead of being held down by it. Multimeter can help diagnose that tho.

[white shard]

that did enter my mind, when talking this over earlier with a friend. I'll try to get the lead a bit more buried in the solder as well.