Arch Linux

Shadoe

Member

Registered: 2025-01-27

Posts: 17

Laptop randomly won't fully shut down

Having a weird issue where the laptop sometimes won't fully shut down.  Power is cut to the display and everything seems to shut down properly, however I can still hear the fans spinning and closing the laptop shut will turn on a blinking light that normally only turns on if you close it while it's on.  I have to hold the power button in order to fully shut it down.  I've let it sit for 5+ minutes and it still won't fully shut down.  It's seemingly random as well, most of the time it will shut down properly.  As far as I know journalctl isn't showing any glaring issue but I'm not very familiar with it.  I haven't been able to isolate any reason why it sometimes happens.  I'll go days without any issues and then suddenly it just sometimes won't shut down, despite not making any changes like installing/upgrading/removing software, and I make sure I fully exit out of every application before shutting down.  I won't know for sure if forcing a poweroff will help since I can't reliably replicate the issue. 

Edit: My current suspicion is that it only happens when my laptop/CPU gets hot.  One time I had back to back failed shutdowns so I tried a poweroff -f which was successful, and that occurred when the laptop was hot and the cooling fans had fully kicked on.  Subsequent normal shutdowns worked after that.  However I'm not sure if that's enough evidence to convince me that's the cause.   

Edit2: Getting the laptop to run hot seems to more consistently cause incomplete shutdown.  Ran a demanding application until the cooling fans were loud, closed all applications and tried a regular shutdown as well as poweroff -f.  Neither worked.  Wondering if this is more of an issue with SMC. 

Specs:

OS: Arch Linux x86_64
Host: MacBook4,1 1.0
Kernel: 6.6.72-1-lts
DE: Xfce 4.20
CPU: Intel Core 2 Duo T8300 (2) @ 2.400GHz
GPU: Intel Mobile GM965/GL960 

Pastebin of journalctl -b-1 is here, snipped at where the shutdown was initiated.  This was made after the last failed shutdown.

Last edited by Shadoe (2025-02-02 21:36:22)

Julia

Member

From: Belgium

Registered: 2024-09-14

Posts: 13

Re: Laptop randomly won't fully shut down

In the GRUB menu, press "e" to edit the kernel parameter.  Add "acpi=force" at the end of the "linux" line so it looks like this:

linux /boot/vmlinuz-linux root=UUID=0a3407de-014b-458b-b5c1-848e92a327a3 rw quiet splash acpi=force

Press Ctrl+x to boot.
If that fixes the problem, add "acpi=force" to the "GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT=" line in /etc/default/grub and do

sudo grub-mkconfig -o /boot/grub/grub.cfg

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Intel Pentium 4 Northwood C 3.4 GHz | NVIDIA GeForce2 MX | ASRock P4i65GV | 1.5 GB DDR333 | 80 GB WD HDD + 150 GB Maxtor HDD

Shadoe

Member

Registered: 2025-01-27

Posts: 17

Re: Laptop randomly won't fully shut down

Didn't work unfortunately.  I've been able to more closely peg down what's causing the issue I think however.  If I plug/unplug the charging cable, I notice the power manager takes a long time to update the power status.  Running acpi in the command line also hangs for a while before giving an output.  If I run acpi after booting without plugging/unplugging the cable, it outputs immediately.  Eventually the power manager and acpi command will no longer accurately reflect the status of the battery (i.e. saying discharging when the charger is plugged in), and it will not update the battery life until I reboot.  This seems to be causing the shutdown failure as well as it's happened every time I've done this.