Shutdown freezes at "Power down"

[plankton172]

Hello PCLinuxOS community!

Last weekend, I put together the following with the purpose of having a low-power computer for web surfing, downloading torrents, and occasional transcoding.

Motherboard: MSI E350IA-E45 (CPU is soldered to the board -- AMD Zacate-FT1 APU, dual core 1.6Ghz)
RAM: G.Skill 4GB DDR3-1333
PSU: Thermaltake Litepower 350W
SSD: Crucial M4 128GB
Casing: Rasurbo SC-08 m-atx
Monitor: Chimei 95ND 18.5" LCD
*no GPU*
*no optical drives*

I installed only one OS: PCLinuxOS 2012.02 KDE. I fully updated through Synaptic, and afterwards installed kernel 3.2.18 pae.bfs. Rebooted and everything works fine.

The problem is when I do a shutdown, it shows the "Shutting down the system" screen but it doesn't really power down the computer...unless I press and hold the case's power switch.

After searching this forum, I made some changes in /boot/grub/menu.lst --

I changed acpi=on to acpi=force and also modified splash=silent to splash=verbose and removed the "quiet" option so I could see what's going on when the computer is shutting down.

The result of the verbose shutdown is everything appears OK (all processes killed, file systems unmounted) and the last lines to be displayed are:

Code: [Select]

Halting system...
Power down.
_

And at this point, the computer freezes.

I notice the shutdown freeze at power down only happens when I've been using the computer for a long-ish time...say, for more than 30 minutes. But if I boot into the desktop, stay for only 5 minutes and then shutdown, the freeze at power down doesn't happen. 

FWIW, I also changed the following in Configure Your Desktop > Hardware > Power Management > Power Profiles -- I unchecked all boxes re: Dim display, etc. The motherboard is only 18W TDP so I am not overly concerned about power savings -- but the freeze at power down still happens. 

Appreciate your help.

Thank you.

[sir_herrbatka]

Is this happens only on this specific kernel?

[plankton172]

No, it also happened in 2.6.38.8 bfs and 2.6.38.8 pae.bfs

[sir_herrbatka]

I suspect hardware/bios problem. Quick googling says that it can happen also on windows. I even found topic on forum but it was just windows noobs blablabla.

Maybe you can try to update bios?

[plankton172]

BIOS is already the most updated version (1.5).

Anyway, I modified /boot/grub/menu.lst again. This time, I changed acpi=force to acpi=ht.

I also went into PCC > Boot > Set up Boot System > Advanced
Unchecked Enable ACPI and Enable Local APIC [OK]. Afterwards clicked Advanced again, then checked Enable ACPI and Enable Local APIC [OK].

After idling for about 15 minutes, I shutdown and..... the computer powered off!

I've since restarted and right now it's been up for 20 minutes. I will wait until after maybe 2 hours -- while surfing, reading, and downloading torrents -- and then see if it powers down properly again.

[sir_herrbatka]

congratulations for making it work :-)

[kjpetrie]

Now you know re-enabling ACPI got it going. However, the big question is whether this will need to be done for every boot. I suspect it will, unless you find out what's disabling it and stop it doing so, or write a script to re-enable it every time.

[plankton172]

Hello again.

Unfortunately, the last adjustments I made would *not* make power down operation consistent. 
Sometimes it would be OK, sometimes it wouldn't.

I am now beginning to suspect it is a hardware issue because of the following:

1) I tried a PCLOS LiveCD and booting was OK... but the shutdown problem is present as well(!) --i.e., sometimes it powers down, sometimes it doesn't.

2) I tried a liveUSB of GParted and booting was OK. Now in my other installs (netbook and quad-core pc) this liveUSB would shutdown and power down flawlessly. But for the first time, in this rig I built, it froze on "power down".

3) Not sure if this is relevant, but I would also like to mention that I created a PCLOS liveUSB using the LiveUSB Creator and that liveUSB works fine on another PC (boots and shuts down properly) but for some reason, it doesn't work on this rig(!). I made the necessary BIOS settings but the screen always says "Error loading operating system".

Anyone using MSI motherboards out there who experience similar problems?

[horusfalcon]

My wife's computer has an MSI motherboard (it's an old AMD64x2, though).  No problems of this type.

Later On,
D