System will not POST after reboot since version 7.04

[Nikolas Reist]

Procedure: Rebooting the PC using common methods in the GUI and OS layers.
Expected Behavior: Computer restarts and POST's
Behavior Exhibited: PC never completes POST automatically and must be hard reset.

I have been using Ubuntu since version 7.04 (i386 and x86_64) with these hardware specifications:

Biostar NF325-A7 (nforce3 based motherboard)
AMD Athlon 64 3400+
1024 MB of ram (recently updated to 2048 MB)
nVidia Geforce 7600 GS AGP 3.0
Seagate SATA 320 GB 3 GB/S (clocked down to 1.5)
Sony DVDRW

With each version I have the same issue (and have also experienced it in Vista x64 which was resolved by one of their updates). When I click Restart, use sudo shutdown -r now, and/or disable splash options on the grub boot line the system will run the restart procedure, the PC will momentarily cut the power to the systemboard and behave like it is restarting. However, my screen will display a message that it isn't receiving signal from the video card, and I must manually restart it with the reset button (regardless of nv or nvidia module). The shutdown routine does not seem to be effected, because it shuts down normally.

I have recently tried the "acpi=off" option to the grub boot sequence and this solves the reboot issue, but then the system does not run the shutdown routine properly. It will attempt to shutdown the system, then when the splash screen goes away, I am stuck with a black screen with a blinking cursor and no power cycling. At this point I have to manually shut the computer down. I was starting to think that perhaps it was a motherboard and/or memory issue. I have run memtest consecutively on both the original 1024 MB (2 x 512), and the new 2048 MB (2 x 1024) ddr1 memory and there were no issues. I have also tried different architectures and it seems the issue is not architecture specific.

So I tried other distributions and found that DreamLinux, OpenSuSE 11.0, and Debian Stable 4 all power down and restart the machine properly. This leads me to believe there is a problem somewhere in the software handling of ACPI or some other kernel support. I have attached lspci, dmesg, dmidecode, and lsmod outputs for both supported Ubuntu versions and OpenSuSE for comparison. Let me know if there is anything else you require.

[Nikolas Reist (zeroability)]

I can confirm that going to System --> Administration --> Services, unlocking it and unchecking Power Management (acpid) resolves this issue entirely.

[Nikolas Reist (zeroability)]

It appears I have spoken too soon. This does not completely fix the issue. It just happens randomly now. I did, however, see an issue with hal shutdown fly by on the screen during the last reboot. From the looks of things, this issues seems very rare. I guess I'll just use SuSE for the time being until I can get a more Ubuntu friendly motherboard.

[Nikolas Reist (zeroability)]

I have done some further investigation on this issue:

While using the Ubuntu 8.04 Live CD if I stop services:

sudo /etc/init.d/powernowd stop
sudo /etc/init.d/acpid stop
sudo /etc/init.d/acpi-support stop

the system will restart normally.

After fresh install and updates if I stop service:

sudo /etc/init.d/powernowd stop

the system will restart normally. I then have to:

sudo update-rc.d -f powernowd remove

in order to be able to restart normally. This process also seems to occur in Intrepid.

[Nikolas Reist (zeroability)]

This bug could probably be closed.