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I recently upgraded from Ubuntu 11.10 to 12.04. If it makes any difference, my system is a Dell Inspiron 1520.

I encounter a problem whenever I shutdown or restart; it kills all running processes (as far as I can tell), but once I get past the shutdown text screen and the screen goes black, my computer doesn't power off. The fans still run and the screen is still on, etc. I have to hold down the power button in order to complety shut down.

Does anyone know how to resolve this problem?

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  • 1
    Ok, just to make sure, you are shutting down by clicking the right corner button and pressing shutdown right?
    – eltommo
    Apr 27, 2012 at 4:38
  • 2
    yes. That is right
    – Justin H
    Apr 27, 2012 at 4:39
  • 2
    ok, while you are looking for a solution to this problem, you should be able to work around it by typing sudo poweroff at a terminal prompt, or if you are unfamiliar with the terminal press "alt-f2" and type "gksudo poweroff" and that may bring your computer to a complete power off.
    – eltommo
    Apr 27, 2012 at 4:42
  • I have the same problem on exactly the same model (Inspiron 1520). The culprit seems to be the proprietary NVIDIA graphics driver. If you uninstall it and fallback to Nouveau it will work as usual. To run Nouveau instead of the NVIDIA driver you just remove/inactivate [both] NVIDIA drivers in "additional drivers" (not running English system so I can't be sure of the name). Ubuntu will then use Nouveau automatically. Depending on your usage though, Nouveau might not be "good enough". But in my case I don't need the performance of the NVIDIA driver (no gaming here!).
    – krax
    Apr 27, 2012 at 18:11
  • 1
    Similar post Why can't I restart/shutdown?
    – dma_k
    May 14, 2019 at 22:26

7 Answers 7

34

I have the same problem and found a solution which worked out for me.

Type in terminal:

  1. EDITOR=gedit sudoedit /etc/default/grub
  2. Find the line: GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash"
  3. Change this to: GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash acpi=force"
  4. Save the file and close the file.
  5. Finally, in terminal: sudo update-grub
  6. exit (to end the root shell)

I found it here: Dell Studio 1569 Cannot Shutdown in Ubuntu 11.10 or 12.04

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  • 16
    This does not appear to work either.
    – skeggse
    Aug 1, 2012 at 18:57
  • this seemed to work for me, on my Dell XPS M1330 with an Nvidia 8400M
    – fohswe
    Aug 11, 2012 at 23:41
  • Works for me. Dell XPS M1530 Nvidia 8600
    – Garfield
    Oct 2, 2012 at 1:59
  • The solution above worked for a while but then the problem re-occurred. So I removed acpi=force from GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT and added it to GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX instead, using the steps above (i.e. GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX="acpi=force"). Then I shut down the computer, using the power button to power off after it stopped shutting down at the black screen with a series of messages that ended with "[end trance ...]" as it did before (I had GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="" to show messages instead of the splash screen). After re-booting, shutdown worked correctly (I tested it several times).
    – Cee
    Oct 28, 2012 at 2:44
  • The problem re-occured after another update with Update Manager. As before, the screensaver also froze (even with just blank screen & 2d screensavers) when trying to return to using the computer after a while. And again there was also freezing at the screensaver instead of automatic shutdown of the computer by Power Management. Shutdown works properly again after following the steps above (moving acpi=force to GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT this time) shutting down and manually powering off. So you may have to repeat these steps each time the problem reoccurs, seemingly after system updates.
    – Cee
    Nov 11, 2012 at 0:40
7

Another possible solution - especially for newer hardware using (U)EFI - is to add the boot parameter apm=power_off. You can add it to the definition of GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT in /etc/default/grub or add the line if it does not exist yet.

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="apm=power_off"

Then update the grub installation according to your operating systems manual, e.g: update-grub or grub2-mkconfig -o /boot/efi/EFI/[osname]/grub2.cfg or similar.

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  • Thanks. Worked on desktop PC with Gigabyte Mobo and Skylake processor running Ubuntu 16.04.
    – abchk1234
    Jun 25, 2019 at 5:52
  • Worked for me on Lenovo ideapad 330s with LXLE (ubuntu) 16.04. The other solutions did not work for me. Thank you! Aug 6, 2019 at 10:36
  • Worked on Z590 Phantom Gaming-ITX/TB4 with Manjaro 21.1.1
    – birneee
    Aug 27, 2021 at 13:25
  • Worked on an Asrock running Ubuntu. Thanks.
    – Jason L.
    Mar 4, 2023 at 16:37
3

It is a bug. Ref - https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/987933

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The key may be in this sentence, "it kills all running processes". In my case, it did NOT! The problem was caused by the redis-server process which, for some reason, couldn't be stopped normally. Once I killed all redis-serverprocesses, sudo killall redis-server, I was able to do shut down normally. Since I don't need redis that often, I stopped it from running at startup with these commands:

sudo update-rc.d -f redis-server remove

sudo update-rc.d -f redis_6379 remove

I will wait for an update that fixes this problem, but for now I will remember to stop the redis process before shutting down. It may not be redis in your case, but it's likely a buggy process that Ubuntu couldn't kill.

This may help you inspect the problem:

  • service --status-all: lists all services registered with the system. Services that start with OS boot will have a [+] symbol before them.

  • Read the log messages that appear on the screen when you press the power button to manually power off. In my case, I read something about trying to close the redis server. The messages may also appear if you press some random keys.

  • Review the programs you installed recently, maybe one of them is causing the problem.

  • Try closing all unnecessary processes and see if you can shut down normally. If you can, repeat the process, narrowing down the candidates, till you reach the buggy app.

0

I encountered the same thing with Ubuntu 18.04, the solution above did not work for me and I end up updating the kernel to 5.03

sudo apt install --install-recommends linux-generic-hwe-18.04

And then reboot.

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After installing windows 10 on a different partition I had the same issue. Even after removing windows and creating a new partition table in that drive didn’t solve the problem (I thought it could be something windows installer wrote to the drive’s MBR). All the linux distros on other drives and partitions couldn’t shutdown. Kernel instructions didn’t help either. What solved the problem was removing the motherboard battery before I went to work and after this reset to the BIOS/CMOS the problem was solved.

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As per suggestions above:

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX="acpi=force"

Worked for powering off a Xubuntu 22.04 (with EFI boot) that didn't want to power off on shutdown.

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