Why do I get a reboot instead of a shutdown?

Question

After two days of installation, strangely my Ubuntu machine is restarting instead of shutdown from both desktop GUI and command line.

sudo shutdown -h now
sudo halt  # (doesn't shutdown, instead freezes on boot screen Plymouth)

I had force shutdown by powering off the machine.

This is not happening all the times.

I have been using Ubuntu for 6 months and never experienced this kind of problem.

Solution 1

I faced the same issue after I installed Ubuntu 12.04 on a newly built machine. This answer on another post helped me resolve it:

I resolved by adding acpi=noirq to the kernel arguments

sudo editor /etc/default/grub

Add

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="acpi=noirq quiet splash"

Then

sudo update-grub

Solution 2

Go into your machines BIOS and check for an option called wake-on-lan or something similar and disable it.

This was what caused this problem on my machine.

Solution 3

I had the same issue with new acer aspre v5 notebook. It has been solved by enabling laptop-mode as running

sudo apt-get install laptop-mode-tools

Solution 4

In my case it was a Wake On Lan motherboard (Gigabyte GA-Z77M-D3H) issue.

My solution:

Install ethtool:

sudo apt-get install ethtool

Set WOL off:

sudo ethtool -s eth0 wol d

If it works, then edit the /etc/rc.local file and add ethtool -s eth0 wol d, before the exit 0 line.

Hope it will help you.

Solution 5

I have had exactly the same problem on my Acer V5-571G: the laptop shuts down, turns off its power LED, and then starts again after a few seconds. It occurs more often when working on battery.

The problem seems to arise from incorrect work of pm-utils. But if you write on into /sys/bus/*/devices/*/power/control, the kernel takes control over power management at the specified devices - and somehow this makes the hardware to shut down correctly.

So I have written a script:

#!/bin/bash

case "$1" in
  stop) for i in /sys/bus/*/devices/*/power/control ; do echo on > $i ; done 
  ;;
esac

exit 0

and to make it being executed every time before shutdown I've placed it under name K32power-control-on into /etc/rc0.d directory (don't forget to make the script executable, sudo chmod +x K32power-control-on). After that the laptop shuts down ok.

I think that there are only a few buses/devices which need to have 'on' value written to their power/control, so the list of devices in the script can be restricted, but I just didn't investigate further.

UPD: Here is a more refined solution of the same problem: https://www.behnke.io/fedora-17-on-an-aspire-v5-571-reboot-on-shutdown/

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Comments

[irrational John]

Please update your question and tell us what command line shutdown options you have tried and also in what way the shutdown does "not work". How do you "force shutdown"? Are you able to shutdown using the desktop GUI menu? Please do not replay in a comment. Update your question as is recommended in the faq.

[fuenfundachtzig]

"This is not happening all the times." -> I find that this happens only when the power line is unplugged.

[Admin]

I have the same issue on Ubuntu 15.04 on a Lenovo Yoga 2 11. I tried the grub options, but they did not change anything. I found out, that I can get the system to shutdown properly when I attach the external mouse that was attached during installation. After removing the mouse the problem reappears.

[Felipe]

I think my problem is related to the WOL but I need to use this functionality, so I don't want to disable it. Any advice?

[Alvar]

Why would disabling the wlan fix that the computer doesn't shut down correctly?

[lepe]

:( it didn't worked for me. And even more, my wifi, lcd brightness and other functions in my laptop stop working.

[Fakabbir Amin]

Its works, for me after installing laptop-mode-tools and running configuration file from dash.

[kiko]

Surprisingly, I found this worked for my case, though I'm not sure why as there should be no WoL packets being sent to the machine.

[Kane Blueriver]

I have same issue on my Intel NUC, this makes my situation worse, my mouse and keyboard are frozen frequently.

[Enos]

My Ralink RT3290 WIFI card also causes the computer to reboot instead of shutting down, but if the card is put in airplane mode then shutdown works as expected.

[Bram]

shutdown -P now does not work for me: it simply reboots my machines immediately after shutting down.

[Bram]

On my ASUS BIOS this is option: ADVANCED APM Power-On-By-PCI-E and if I disable that, the shutdown succeeds for me.