Ubuntu 14.04 won't shut down

[abcuser]

@marseille2, as I have explained in this thread above there is a difference between "halt" and "power off".


Halt means shutdown operating system, but LEAVE power on! In this case you have to manually press power button on your computer to power it off.
This is the command:

sudo shutdown -h now

or

sudo halt

Power off means shutdown operating system and ALSO power off computer. In this case you don't need to manually press power-off button on your computer to power it off.
So you should be using:

sudo shutdown -P now

or

sudo poweroff

[marseille2]

Ok thank-you very much I will test it!

Here's what happened:

sudo shutdown -P now

did turn off the operating system, but the main power stayed on. The main light switch that normally goes off was still on, a bluetooth dongle was still lit up, and the fan wouldn't stop.

sudo poweroff

only rebooted my computer back into Trusty.

UPDATE: Temporarily Solved (for my system)

Well things temporarily went from bad to worse, after I continued to figure out why I couldn't get a complete shutdown. So I went to the IRC ubuntu channel, and they told me it sounded like an ACPI thing, so I set 'acpi=force' in /etc/grub/default. Didn't work either (note: I didn't remove cairo dock, since I like it).

After reading through launchpad bugs, it started to look like there was no end to the drama. And I couldn't upgrade the Upstart package, since it's up to date ... so I tried the next suggestion. I wish I never listened! But no... and I upgraded my low-latency kernel.

BAD BAD BAD....

My screen went black. But luckily, I still had my old kernels (hidden by grub ... hit the SHIFT key when the computer at bios boot / right after to see them).

Long story short... I rolled back to the last working kernel, and found out I can now do a full shut-down. It also solved another problem that I thought was unrelated ... my mouse was going haywire and being overly sensitive.

I'm so glad that's over... at least for now

My working kernel:

Linux 3.13.0-44-lowlatency

Update 2:

I spoke too soon While rolling back to a working kernel solved the mouse problem, I'm back to the permanent reboot. Except unmounting my drives, I've tried the commands, tweaking the boot, etc... to no avail. I still have to hit the main power switch to turn off the computer.

[ctech-nick]

I tried that, sadly didn't work...

But I managed to find out something else:
I changed the line in /etc/default/grub

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash"

to

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash acpi=off"

and then ran

sudo grub-update

you won't see the results right away because even after updating the grub configuration this is reloaded only on a new restart so the first time you shut down it will behave exactly as before.

This fixed the reboot and made the system reach the point where it prints "System halted" (or something similar) as the last line in the shutdown sequence.
This still means that you have to press the power button to completely turn off the pc but the system is definitely halted.
The reason this happens is because acpi is the power management and by turning it off the system can't turn the pc off.

This is not at all a final solution or even a fix, but I think it shows us where the problem lies, sadly I'm not sure how we could procede from here, I'm going to try booting on a live cd/usb and see if I can turn of from there (maybe something went wrong with the upgrade)

UPDATE:
I tried from live cd and the problem is still the same, sadly I really need my laptop to be in working order (I also noticed that the Suspend behaviour is not working, probably still related to the same bug) so I'm reverting to 13.10 for the time being, hope a fix will come out soon ^^

I took your advice but went to grub boot command line and I did erase ACPI = off since I now have the right driver for Nvidia...

It shut down perfectly on it's own, brithness key are assign and work, but nothing change on screen yet...

On Mackbookpro5.1 Ubuntu 14.04

[HSken]

The solution for me for the " mount: / is busy", using a Compaq Presario V6105NR laptop, with a Broadcom BCM4311 WiFi card was the successful install of a working driver for the WiFi card, using the commands

sudo apt-get remove --purge bcmwl-kernel-source
sudo apt-get install linux-firmware-nonfree

which did not work without purging the bcmwl-kernel-source. System now properly does a shutdown.

DRB

This solved my problem and finally got the wifi working, thanks

[glenn12]

Cheers this worked for me after trying just about everything else! I am also using a Fujitsu Siemens

[Taganini]

That fixed both of my problems: No Shutdown and BCM4311 Wifi card not working! I have an old Compaq Presario C502US. Thanks

[thorogood33]

I had this problem and tried most of the solutions above - I have a Compaq Presario with Pentium 4 and Nvidia Fx 5200 video - no wi-fi card.
PC would reboot ok but only shutdown fully using the off switch. I know it's not critical but I found it niggled.
I thought it was possibly a bios/motherboard/video card issue and spent ages on forums - eventually tried some other distros - Watt OS, Xubuntu, Mint, Debian, LXLE, Bodhi, Crunchbang - all same issue and all Debian based.
Am now running PClinuxOS LXDE which has solved the problem.
PC closes down fine and PClinuxOS has proved a nice smooth OS on a low powered system - (although the legacy Nvidia 173 is no longer supported it runs fine with the xorg nv driver).
Puppy Linux (Slax) also shut down ok. I happen to prefer PCLinuxOS over Puppy so will stick with it.
I don't know if it is relevant but Puppy (Slax) and PCLinuxOS are not based on Debian and do not use systemd.
Hope this helps someone with similar issue.

[g-me-5]

I have tried this and did not fix my problems on 14.10 Acer aspire 5560. Wireless is not working.

[skeeter-mcbee-y]

sudo grub-update

This is not a command. Instead it should be

sudo update-grub