New computer hangs on shutdown/reboot, how to troubleshoot?

[torbengb]

I have bought a new desktop; it's an Acer Revo R3700 nettop with Intel D525 CPU and Nvidia ION2 GPU. I've just installed 10.10 32-bit desktop edition. The system is working perfectly but it freezes during shutdown/reboot/suspend/hibernate:

All windows and the menu bar disappear but the desktop wallpaper remains. It doesn't even show the shutdown screen (the one with the animated dots) where I could hit ESC and watch the shutdown console output. The system is fully updated using Update Manager.

• How can I determine what is causing the freeze?
• Is there a log I can investigate?
• How can I fix this?

I see no obvious cause of the freeze. The only USB attachment is a mouse/keyboard; I don't have any external storage attached; and I don't have any programs running (the machine freezes even when doing shutdown right from the login screen).

What I've tried so far:

1. MemTest competed in 1 hour without errors.
2. Booting with kernel 2.6.35.22 rather than 2.6.35.25 didn't help. Those are the two choices I have in GRUB.
3. Disabling the Nvidia drivers didn't help.
4. Based on other questions that suggest some ACPI settings, I've tried sudo shutdown -h now to see whether the shutdown console text display offers any hints, but the system doesn't even get that far - it still freezes while the screen shown the desktop background image, without any toolbars. Only sudo shutdown --force works, but that's not a solution.
5. Editing the grub menu to add acpi=off to the kernel didn't help.
6. Adding noapic to the grub entry had no discernible effect.
7. Adding nolapic instead did something (I had removed the quiet option) - the system managed to continue further with the shutdown, right until the line Checking for running unattended-upgrades: which were the last characters on the screen.
8. I've also checked the system BIOS, especially regarding power options, but didn't see anything out of the ordinary. Switching the BIOS standby setting from S3 to S1 didn't help. The standby setting can't be disabled, and there are no other ACPI-related settings AFAIK.
9. BIOS reset didn't help. I'm not surprised; I hadn't changed anything.
10. I tried going to a virtual console (CtrlAltF1) and from there did a shutdown -h now and it froze there too.
11. Booting from Live CD (USB stick in fact) didn't help; it freezes the same way.
12. Booting from Live CD, with acpi=off noapic nolapic didn't help either. Neither did just nolapic. I guess this means that the problem is not some custom setting in my install, but some sort of basic issue?

As you can see, I've already tried a lot of things, based on helpful input from other forums. I haven't solved it yet, so I'm now also asking here in the hope that fresh eyes can see something others have missed. I'm new to Linux, but capable of following instructions

I dearly hope that a solution exists. It would be catastrophic to not be able to suspend, or even shutdown; that would mean having to ditch Linux and move back to Windows again, which I'd really hate to do.

[pmlxuser]

did you test your disk for errors?? i would try another disk or distro all together and see how things work out..

[zenwalker]

dmesg command shall show you whats happening in your system before any panic could happen. But i wonder how you can see it since shutdown is freezing.

Well what you could do is, when the shutdown happens, (logs updated till freeze happens), just do a hard reset and then pop in the live cd and chroot into the / paritition and then see the contents of /var/log/dmesg file.

[timgood]

The problem is with the wireless adapter. I have the same model and the wrong driver is loaded which prevents shutdown. To fix it you need to do this:

Open a terminal and type:

sudo modprobe -rf rt2860sta

Followed by:

sudo modprobe rt2860sta

Then you need to blacklist the wrong driver:

echo blacklist rt2800pci | sudo tee -a /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf

Once you have rebooted (you will need to do a hard power off for the last time!) you will find you can reboot properly. Thanks to Linuxexperte for this fix.

Hope this helps.

[torbengb]

@timgood, this sounds very promising! I'll try that tonight at home and report back afterwards. Thank you!

@zenwalker, I'll try your suggestion if timgood's tip doesn't resolve the problem. Thanks!

@pmlxuser, I didn't test the disk, but it's brand new. I don't want to replace the disk because it's built into a new nettop pc that I don't want to crack open because I might want to return it if this isn't solvable. I did try two separate Live CD's (using USB stick).

I'll report back.

[torbengb]

@timgood: Amazing! Three lines of terminal input and less than two minutes of work (including testing!!) and this problem that has been bothering me for a week is just gone! May I offer you a virtual beer?!

[Alan.Brown]

I have just bought and set up an HP-200-5220a with Ubuntu 10.10 and openSuSE 11.3 and have been getting the same problem on shutdown/reboot on both versions of Linux. I have also had freezing at random times about once or twice an hour for no apparent reason (maybe related to mouse usage).

None of the logs indicate any error situation - I guess if the system freezes then nothing is written to a log anyway.

I have had no problem with Windows 7.

I will try the above suggestions and see what happens.

Alan

[Alan.Brown]

I can now shutdown/reboot Ubuntu OK. I was able to shut down openSuSE OK before. I will have to run the system for a few hours to see if the sporadic freezing has been fixed - I will get back to you on this later.

Thanks for the suggestion.

Alan

[timgood]

@timgood: Amazing! Three lines of terminal input and less than two minutes of work (including testing!!) and this problem that has been bothering me for a week is just gone! May I offer you a virtual beer?!

Mmmmn! Austrian beer! Nice.

[Alan.Brown]

I have used the computer extensively under both Ubuntu and openSuSE and have not had any further sporadic freezing so the problem has definitely been fixed. There is no problem with shutdown and reboot under Ubuntu now.

Thanks timgood.

Alan