Take the 2-minute tour ×

I have not tried a version of Ubuntu prior to 11.10 on my machine.

The laptop will not shut down or restart. Shutting down causes it to pause at "Will now Halt", where upon it sits until the battery dies. Restarting causes a similar problem, the machine never completely turns off. The screen is still on, the hard drive continues to run, everything is still on.

It is a similar problem to an unresolved issue posted over at the Ubuntu Forums: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1951446

share|improve this question
Please mark your answer as accepted. Thanks! –  belacqua Oct 26 '12 at 16:24
This is a bug and should be reported. As such it is off topic on this site. –  con-f-use Oct 27 '12 at 15:17
add comment

3 Answers

I fixed the problem.

Dell's ACPI support is incredibly bad.

Because of this, you have to open up the grub configuration file and add the property acpi=force.

gksu gedit /etc/default/grub

Once there, find where it says, GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash"

Change this to read:

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash acpi=force"

Save it, then run this command to update your grub configuration.

sudo update-grub

Finally, reboot, and your machine should now be able to shutdown and reboot without correctly!

share|improve this answer
add comment

If you are using Laptop-mode-tools, you might should try removing it.

I had a similar problem: whenever I tried to shut down when running on battery, everything seems to go normally, until it says "will now halt" and then "power down" after which my laptop doesn't shut down as it normally would, but nothing happens anymore and I have to press the start-up button for 6 seconds to shut it down.

This problem however disappeared after removing laptop-mode-tools. (the first shut down after removal was still problematic)

I don't know what exactly caused the problem, nor how to fix it with lmt still installed (there has to be a way I think, but I'm quite new to GNU/Linux so I don't have a clue how to. The fixes I found for similar problems didn't solve mine.)

share|improve this answer
add comment

As suggested in this bugreport I tried to add INIT_HALT=POWEROFF to /etc/default/halt and that solved my problem for what concerns both halting and rebooting of the machine.

share|improve this answer
add comment

Your Answer


