I've looked through the FAQ and the transmission threads and nothing has really answered my problem.

My battery died after not driving my truck for almost two weeks. I bought a new battery and after installing it my transmission won't shift out of first gear. Prior to swapping the battery the transmission was shifting perfectly. I had developed some sluggish shifting about a month before but I flushed the fluid and put in a new throttle position sensor and that fixed everything. Now this.

I drive a 1997 Ram 2500 5.9L gasoline pick up. I tried to unplug the 8 pin connector on the transmission but 1) I'm not sure I unplugged the right plug. The only plug I could find with more than two wires faces straight down towards the ground and has a circular face. 2) When I unplugged this plug and tried to manually shift it still wouldn't shift out of first.

So now I'm clueless.

-Steve

 

I think thats your problem. If you "flushed" the tranny, that'll cause gunk to start floating around and will eventually mess up your tranny. However, if by flush, you meant changed, then we're back to square 1.

 

Well yeah. Jiffy Lube flushed and changed my ATF.

 

two things first hopefully they used atf+4 and not another fluid.. happens a lot. but likely you have the exact problem I and many others had causing the transmission to go into "limp home mode" where it wont shift past first..(usually accompanied by the sluggish shifting first and then total failure if ignored) .. the cause is the common Governor pressure solenoid and sensor failure (they should be changed as a pair since its easier than guess ing and doing it twice.... there are many threads on this if you use the search function and you can even find pics...I did mine and it was the first time I worked on a transmission.... not hard at all basically just requires you drop the pan and filter to get to the stuff.
If you had a code reader you would see its giving you an error even though there is no lights on dash popping up...thats how I found the cause of mine. previous owner had the sluggish hard shifting and thought the tranny was failing and decided to pull a fast one and sell it to me..it stopped shifting at all the second day I owned it when I finally got it registered.. thank god it was only a $200 repair

 

Yeah I read that. I haven't read anywhere where someone has had this happen after changing a battery though. I've also read that you can test that theory by unplugging the 8 pin connector and shifting manually. I've tried that, was unable to be sure I was unplugging the correct plug on the tranny and wasn't able to shift manually.

 

I think that's just a coincident.

 

Just throwing this out there because it literally just happened to me, but I replaced my battery and all kinds of weird problems started, although in my case nothing with the tranny, but you never know, turned out a wire bundle had slipped under one of the screws that holds that battery brace in and I screwed right through it.

Here was my thread on it: https://dodgeforum.com/forum/2nd-gen...-problems.html