Unable to shutdown completely

[Ben Van Aerde]

Binary package hint: plymouth

I'm using Ubuntu's Release Candidate of 10.04 Lucid Lynx on my Acer TravelMate 4001WLMi. I update daily.
When shutting down, it looks like it gets stuck in a loop, displaying the Plymouth shutdown page (with the
5 dots with the changing color).

The hard drive stops spinning, so I guess it gets stuck completely at the end. At that point, it's no longer possible to switch to a terminal, as the laptop is not responding to key strokes anymore.

I have to force the shutdown, or else the laptop will keep showing the shutdown page.

[Steve Langasek (vorlon)]

Thank you for taking the time to report this issue and help to improve Ubuntu.

If you press the 'Esc' key in this situation, does it have any effect?

If you boot without the 'splash' option, does this hang occur? If so, what is the last text shown on the screen?

[Ben Van Aerde (benvanaerde)]

Pressing 'Esc' does not help.

I have logged into a terminal (CTRL+ALT+F1), and switched to this terminal when shutting down. These are the last two lines I saw:

The system is going down for halt NOW!
init: ureadahead main process (266) terminated with status 5

After that, only a hard reset works.

I will try it without 'splash' later on today.

[Steve Langasek (vorlon)]

> init: ureadahead main process (266) terminated with status 5

How long after you booted did you reboot? ureadahead is a process that should run at startup, and finish within the first four minutes after the system finishes booting (and that's an extraordinarily long time). If there are processes hanging around when they shouldn't, perhaps we're looking at a problem with upstart on your system.

[Ben Van Aerde (benvanaerde)]

Ok, good point. Indeed, I did this right after booting.
I'm really sorry I can't test it right now, as I'm at work. I will test again this evening (in about 12 hours).

Others are having this problem too:
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1445140

[Ben Van Aerde (benvanaerde)]

This time I waited a bit longer, used firefox and other programs.
Also, I logged in to a terminal again.

After pressing "shut down", I quickly switched to the terminal.
This is what I got:

The system is going down for halt NOW!
init:ahavi-daemon main process (613) terminated with status 255
modem-manager: caught signal 15, shutting down
init: disconnected from system bus
Checking for running unattended-upgrades: Asking all remaining processes to terminate...
* all processes ended within 2 seconds [OK]
* deconfiguring network interfaces [OK]
* deactivating swap [OK]
* unmounting weak filesystems [OK]
* will now halt

This is where it ends. The cursor keeps blinking. No keyboard input is accepted at that time, so the only option is a hard reset.

Do you need more info? Please ask...

[Ben Van Aerde (benvanaerde)]

How is the easiest way to boot without splash?

[Ben Van Aerde (benvanaerde)]

I'm going to do a fresh install of the the final release. Hopefully the problem will be fixed then.

[Steve Langasek (vorlon)]

> * will now halt

That you've gotten to this point, but the system doesn't shut down, points to a kernel problem rather than a plymouth one. Reassigning.

[Ben Van Aerde (benvanaerde)]

If you need more testing, please let me know.

[Ben Van Aerde (benvanaerde)]

Forgot to add: I have installed the final release of 10.04 and tested again.
The same problem occurs.

[Stephan Volkmann (volkmannstephan)]

my system is infected to this problem since updating to Lucid
booting old sys with karmic shutdown corectly
kernel 2.6.34-999 from ppa/mainline will work and shutdown my maschine

think kernel 2.6.32-22-generic #33 needs a fix to properly shutdown (ACPI-Table Prob? )

cu, stephan

[Spencer Walker (swalker23)]

I am having the same issue on Kubuntu.

[Andrew Simpson (andrew-simpson)]

This appears to be a duplicate of Bug #569271.

Bug #569271 has a description of what is actually causing the problem and a workaround that is confirmed as working.

[alterpinguin (test-dr)]

i could solve my poweroff failure at shutdown
(see message with listings of dmsg, lspci, etc. in
bug
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/580867
)
i used as the only kernel-boot-option:

acpi=oldboot

and the shutdown with poweroff did work like in older kernel versions again.

[Romain Lafarguette (romain-lafarguette)]

Have the same problem here. Did you find a way to fix it ? How change the kernel-boot-option ?

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.