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Ubuntu 16.04 kernel 4.5.4-040504-generic

Whenever I try to reboot or power off I receive:

Failed to power off system via logind: Transaction is destructive.

This began at the same time that I started encountering a prompt at the login menu saying something along the lines of Enter encryption key for (swap partition) ... or not!

When viewing systemctl list-jobs there are three different units running:

[email protected] start running
390 dev-mapper-cryptswap1.swap            start waiting
391 dev-mapper-cryptswap1.device          start running

The status of poweroff.target is Active: inactive (dead) as well as for reboot.

Also, the UUID for my swap partition as listed under blkid, matches that of the one listed in the fstab file.

I'm not sure if these are connected issues or not, they seemed to pop up at the same time after issuing

apt-get update/upgrade

two days previous to this posting.

The workaround to this that I have found is running:

ps aux | grep suspend

And then using the PID listed to issue(in the non-graphical shell, ctrl-alt-f1):

sudo kill -9 <PID> 

After first entering:

sudo service lightdm stop

Finally:

sudo shutdown -h now

seems to power off the machine. It may be fine for a boot or two, but then the same problem occurs.

dmesg isnt being very helpful because I'm running on a surface pro 3 and the wifi is still being inconsistent filling up the prompt with continuous enable/disable messages. Any thoughts?

*Edit: My root partition is encrypted

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I use Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, but I still had problems shutting down as well. The solution I found was just to go into the Terminal and type sudo shutdown -h now, but your problem seems different. I see you've already tried that option. Maybe specify a scheduled shutdown instead, or do sudo shutdown instead. Often the -h now command messes up shutting the PC down. Also, is there a power button located anywhere on your machine?

For example, I have a desktop (HP Envy 750-045z), and when I want to shut it down, but sudo shutdown -h now does not work, I simply walk over to my desktop case and hold down the power button for a solid 6 seconds.

This seems to work. Even if your OS is acting up and not allowing you to shut down, the button on your machine will tend to work better.

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  • I do have a power button on my machine and it works to power it down, however, I tend to try not to shut down the system that way because I'm not sure if it gives the kernel the time it needs to safely complete its processes and poweroff without doing something harmful or irreparable. So i tend to use that as a last resort, and no. The shutdown command returns the same standard error as the reboot/poweroff cmd. May 25, 2016 at 1:30
  • I had the same problem whether with halting or rebooting, just replace reboot.target with poweroff.target in the message error. The discussion in this AskUbuntu post also shows that this is an acknowledged bug. Aug 24, 2016 at 20:41

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