Computer restarts on shutdown

[MorrisseyJ]

Hi,

I have a problem with my computer occasionally restarting on shutdown.

Sometimes when i shutdown it reboots. At the login screen, i can shutdown and it seems to always shut down properly from there.

I have read elsewhere that this might be a power setting in the BIOS, but i think not as i) it doesn't happen in windows (which i dual boot) and ii) it only happens some of the time and never if i shutdown straight from the login screen.

Its not a world-ending problem, but its a bit of a hassle if i am in a rush to go somewhere and want to shut my machine down and it decides to restart.

This is all trying with shutdown from the cog in the top right of the panel.

I am running 12.04 (64bit) on a thinkpad x131e.

Any help would be appreciated.

[dino99]

kind of trouble not easy to narrow down
maybe you can find something usefull logged either into xsession-errors or /var/log/

you can also remove "quiet splash" from /etc/default/grub then run : sudo update-grub. That way you will be able to see the shutdown comments.

[MorrisseyJ]

Hi Dino99,

Thanks for getting back to me.

Do you have any idea what sort of thing i might be looking for?

I should be able to shut down and if the machine restarts, check the time. I should then be able to scan the logs for activity at this time, no?

[MorrisseyJ]

Problem persists.

Can anyone tell me how i look in the log files and what i might be looking out for?

Thanks,

[Shellbak3]

I'm having the same problem on a clean 11.10 install.

I had previously upgraded a 11.04 to 11.10, created a couple of users, a new group etc. and noticed some problems. There was no icon to click to shutdown and then I couldn't change the screen settings for the users and shutdown didn't work from an alternate way from the GUI nor from terminal: it rebooted. Shortly there after I could only boot to console with some repeated attempts at boot.

I installed a clean version of 11.10 Tuesday, created a couple of users, etc. and today I'm in a reboot cycle when I attempt to shutdown.

I really can't see attempting to set up this machine until the problem is fixed. My machine is a PC104 32 bit. I have another that was upgraded from 10.04 to 11.04 to 11.10 with no signs of trouble - yet.

[apochry]

You can shut is down with

sudo poweroff

Not that it's a solution, but I would do that and wait for 12.10 in two weeks, since the issue is kind of nasty.

Regards,
- Christo

[MorrisseyJ]

In syslog i found the following errors and warnings:

Errors:

watchdog: error registering /dev/watchdog (err=-16).

- This appears to be related to me, for some reason, having two watchdogs which operate on waking from suspend. Its easy to blacklist one of them. To me this seems like the most relevant error to my reboot/restart problem.

EXT4-fs (sda5): re-mounted. Opts: errors=remount-ro

- This is some kind of read-write error, the webpages about which i don't understand.

<error> [1349387438.2745] [nm-device-wifi.c:2591] real_update_permanent_hw_address(): (eth1): unable to read permanent
MAC address (error 0)

- This, it seems, has to do with my broadcom wirless chip, but i don't really know much more than that.

Warnings:

dnsmasq[26261]: warning: no upstream servers configured

- I am not sure what this is, it might have to do with my VPN

As i said, it looks like the watchdog error might be the one, but i don't know enough about this stuff to have a sense. If anyone has any advice i'd appreciate it.

[MorrisseyJ]

Using:

sudo poweroff

seems to shut things down properly.

Does this mean that there might be a bug in the shutdown process via the cog? If so, how can i diagnose?

j

[MorrisseyJ]

Nope

sudo poweroff

doesn't seem to work, as it too sometimes results in a restart.

Thoughts?

[MorrisseyJ]

Bump: Problem persists under 12.10.