-------- Original Message -------- Subject: Re: problematic poweroff on shutdown Date: Mon, 02 Jan 2012 08:42:08 -0800 From: Don Juan <donjuansjiz@gmail.com> To: Curt <curty@free.fr> On 01/02/2012 08:34 AM, Curt wrote:
Periodically, for no reason I can fathom, or trace to a specific cause, when I shutdown my machine, it fails to power off. The shutdown procedure unrolls, or unfurls, as expected, but at the point where it says at the console "Will now halt," instead of a power off taking place, the console displays an additional message: "Power off". At that point, my only alternative is to press the power buttom at the front of the machine for five seconds, which turns the machine off (this seems a gentler alternative to yanking out the power cord from the socket, as the psu on this 'puter has no power switch). How would I go about trouble-shooting this erratic behavior? I hijacked another thread in which I posited that the problem was related to plugging in an external usb hard drive. This supposition has turned out to be false (post hoc ergo propter hoc), as so many of my suppositions do these days. ;-) There's nothing in the logs to distinguish the no poweroff shutdowns from the poweroff ones (I don't think; I have looked).
you could always do alt+sysrq REISUB that's a gentler way to shut down (reboot actually) in an extreme case like that, then you could always edit grub and go directly to init 3. Depending on your kernel adding "kernel.sysrq = 1" will activate it REISUB But I think you have to enable it in sysctl.conf, if I remember correctly off the top of my head. What kind of video card are you running. Have you tried switching to another console when it freezes? If its a nvidia or ati card you could have the dreaded issues of xorg-server not playing nicely. I just recently had to pin xorg-server in sid to be able to cleanly shutdown and reboot again. There are a bunch of bugs open in regards to nvidia and ati and most are in relation to xorg-server. Best guess I can make without info Sorry sent this earlier but I did not send the reply to the list.