system shutdown fails

[red devil]

Hi,
Every time I try to shut down my machine it hangs at the 'System Halted' message - and fails to shut down, so I have to do it manually.
Anyone have any ideas why this is happening? The 'restart' option works fine, BTW.

[JRD]

I had the same problem on ZW before, but it was not "everytime".
Maybe you have a problem with ACPI. Try to disable it on boot "acpi=no".

[thenktor]

Is this the old machine mentioned in the other thread? These machines often had such problems. AFAIR there are some kernel options that can help.

[gapan]

Yes, probably an old system with an incompatibility with acpi. I would suggest adding "acpi=force" in the /etc/lilo.conf append line and trying with that (don't forget to run lilo -v after you make the changes). There could be other options that might fix it, like noapic, nolapic and more, but they are hit or miss as they depend on the exact hardware. Be careful with those, because they might fix your problem, but they might also make your system unbootable, so be prepared for a system rescue if something fails.

[thenktor]

Don't add it to lilo.conf for testing! Just hit <tab> at the Lilo screen and add the options by hand to the Lilo command line.

[red devil]

Just noticed an ACPI warning at boot-up so it looks like that's the problem - I'll try a few of your suggestions and see how I get on.
Thanks guys.

[Akuna]

To confirm the point brought up by Gapan, I recently had the same problem when I installed Salix on my neighbour's older PC & adding: acpi=force at the end of the append= line in /etc/lilo.conf (and re-running lilo -v) did fix it.

Make sure you leave one space at the end of the append line before the final "