SOLVED - Pclos won't shutdown

[Maurice]

I've had this problem before and now have it with my wife's machine. It happens on the first update after a reinstall. When she presses "Leave" she gets a stream of verbosity scrolling up very fast. Sometimes it doesn't stop but if it does stop the last words are "panic occurred".

I have reinstalled twice but with no improvement.

A similar thing happened on my machine some time ago and I cured it by disabling acpi but that does not help here.

Thanks for any helpful ideas
Maurice

[Just17]

TDid you try some of the other acpi boot options?

acpi=           [HW,ACPI,X86]
                        Advanced Configuration and Power Interface
                        Format: { force | off | strict | noirq | rsdt }
                        force -- enable ACPI if default was off
                        off -- disable ACPI if default was on
                        noirq -- do not use ACPI for IRQ routing
                        strict -- Be less tolerant of platforms that are not
                                strictly ACPI specification compliant.
                        rsdt -- prefer RSDT over (default) XSDT
                        copy_dsdt -- copy DSDT to memory

You should provide hardware information of the machine as someone else may have had a similar problem.

[Maurice]

TDid you try some of the other acpi boot options?

acpi=           [HW,ACPI,X86]
                        Advanced Configuration and Power Interface
                        Format: { force | off | strict | noirq | rsdt }
                        force -- enable ACPI if default was off
                        off -- disable ACPI if default was on
                        noirq -- do not use ACPI for IRQ routing
                        strict -- Be less tolerant of platforms that are not
                                strictly ACPI specification compliant.
                        rsdt -- prefer RSDT over (default) XSDT
                        copy_dsdt -- copy DSDT to memory

You should provide hardware information of the machine as someone else may have had a similar problem.

Thanks Just18. No I didn't, and I don't know how to. Machine info is in my sig

[Just17]

A similar thing happened on my machine some time ago and I cured it by disabling acpi but that does not help here.

Try some of the other acpi options like you did with turning it off ......  one of them might work for you

acpi=force
acpi=off
acpi=strict
acpi=noirq

[Archie]

When shutting down, go verbose (press Esc) and note where it is failing.

When she presses "Leave" she gets a stream of verbosity scrolling up very fast. Sometimes it doesn't stop but if it does stop the last words are "panic occurred".

That don't look good. Do you have any USB devices connected when you shutdown?

Please Safely remove if you have any then try to shutdown again.

[Maurice]

Try some of the other acpi options like you did with turning it off ......  one of them might work for you

acpi=force
acpi=off
acpi=strict
acpi=noirq

Thanks Just18, I'll try those. I've already tried acpi=ht without success.

[Maurice]

When shutting down, go verbose (press Esc) and note where it is failing.

When she presses "Leave" she gets a stream of verbosity scrolling up very fast. Sometimes it doesn't stop but if it does stop the last words are "panic occurred".

That don't look good. Do you have any USB devices connected when you shutdown?

Please Safely remove if you have any then try to shutdown again.

Thanks Archie. Pressing Esc doesn't halt the flow. No usb devices connected.

[Maurice]

I tried the acpi variants - off, force etc but each time it failed and I had to make a hard switch off. Now when I try to start the machine I get a console screen. I then log in and enter "startx" but I get the error message "Fatal error, no screens found"

I presume my file system has become corrupt. In the meantime my wife is using Scientific Linux which I installed some time ago. It has the gnome desktop and is easy to use. Her needs are very simple - in one word ... Facebook.

So, as I have reinstalled and updated Pclos twice and got the same problem each time it seems there might be a fault in the hardware/software.

If there are no more suggestions in the next day or so I will mark the thread solved.

Many thanks for your help Just18 and Archie.

[Just17]

I presume my file system has become corrupt.

Can you log in as root?

Do you have a separate /home partition?

You can do a   fsck   on the PCLOS partition/s from a liveCD.

I then log in and enter "startx" but I get the error message "Fatal error, no screens found"

Do a forum search for this    "Fatal error, no screens found"   including quotes.
There might be something in the three results I got that would help.

[Phil]

Oi! Maurice,

"I had to make a hard switch off."

You need to know about raising elephants....easy when you know how
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_SysRq_key

See below




########################################

Cross post from Jonesy:

"....whole system including laptop locks up requiring holding down power key to shut off and reboot."


That is seriously risky. A word to the wise. When your system becomes that unresponsive better to raise the skinny elephant, that will save a whole heap of unimaginable trouble.

Raising Skinny Elephants Is Utterly Boring

Using the Left Alt key:
Code:

Alt+SysRq+r  
Alt+SysRq+s
Alt+SysRq+e
Alt+SysRq+i
Alt+SysRq+u
Alt+SysRq+b


That will bring your recalcitrant system safely back to conciousness.

[Maurice]

Oi! Maurice,

"I had to make a hard switch off."

You need to know about raising elephants....easy when you know how
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_SysRq_key

Thanks Phil. I know about reisub but that is not possible with a completely unresponsive keyboard. There is absolutely no alternative to switching off at the plug - none at all.

[Maurice]

I presume my file system has become corrupt.

Can you log in as root?

Do you have a separate /home partition?

You can do a   fsck   on the PCLOS partition/s from a liveCD.

I then log in and enter "startx" but I get the error message "Fatal error, no screens found"

Do a forum search for this    "Fatal error, no screens found"   including quotes.
There might be something in the three results I got that would help.

When I got the console screen I logged in as root, then typed "startx" and got that error message "No screens found".

I don't have a /home partition.

I did a search but nothing was found even though I did the search on all the forums.

Trying fsck from the livecd (cd /media/PcLinuxOS) fsck I get -- fsck from util-linux-ng 2,18

Edit

Just done the search again and got the three results.   Will go through them.

[Phil]

Sorry the elephants idea was no good.

Silly question:

"as I have reinstalled and updated Pclos twice and got the same problem each time"
Did you use the same installation disk? Presume you checked it etc. Seems odd that scientific works fine but PCLOS does not. Corrupt installation media?

J18 knows more than me so leave him to ponder.

ps Sometime there are several fsck variants. In the terminal type fsck and the tab to see them. Sometimes I specify the ext4 variant

[Maurice]

Went through the three search results and found one that seemed relevant with a post from Texstar suggesting removing the xorg.conf and replacing it with a new one

At the root terminal console

# Remove existing xorg.conf file
rm -rf /etc/X11/xorg.conf

#Generate a new xorg.config file
XFdrake --auto

#startx to log into the desktop
startx --

but it didn't work. I got the same error message as before "No screens found"

[Just17]

just in case .......  at the prompt type

pcc


and go through it to set up the graphics card using the vesa driver and see if it could possibly affect things.


Do check the installation media, as Phil suggested ......