Problem Shutting down or rebooting

J. Erik Hemdal ehemdal at townisp.com
Thu Apr 15 00:40:14 UTC 2004


>I am running Fedora Core on a Dell Inspiron 8100 laptop and am having
>trouble with shutdown/reboot.
>Many aspects of it work correctly. In particular it runs the INIT script,
>stops processes, shuts things down, and then hangs forever after the
>message: INIT: no more processes left in this runlevel

The init process message is OK.  It means that you have no processes for
init to work on (either to kill or to start).
Look in /etc/rc.d/rc.0 for a "shutdown" process.  It will be something like
"SXXshutdown" in this directory, and will be an executable symbolic link.
"XX" will be some numbers.

The S means that this process gets started in runlevel 0, which is the one
that shuts the system down.  So every process running gets killed by init
(those are the K's) and then this one takes you down. But at this point, the
power management system needs to come in and turn the system off.

I'm assuming that after you directly power off with the button, that the
system goes down.  And then, upon reboot, the system reports that the
disk(s) are dirty or that "repair is needed" in among all the bootup
messages.  Is my guess correct?.

If this is so, then your runlevel 0 (zero) is probably awry.  Otherwise, I'd
suspect a power-management problem.

>At this point the machine needs to be directly powered off or powered off
>and on again for another boot. In the hope that this was related to the Red
>Hat 9 SMP problem, I added apm=power-off to the grub kernel boot line, but
>no joy.

Are you certain that you have an APM machine?  Might you have an ACPI system
instead?  I had this problem with my ACPI laptop (an Inspiron 1100) until I
changed the boot parameters in GRUB to enable ACPI.  If in your boot log you
see a message that says something like "APM BIOS not found", you actually
don't have APM.

>Help,

>Paul

Hope this helps.  Come back with more detail and perhaps I can be of more
help.   Erik





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