hangs when shutdown

[funsani]

I am a newbie running mandrake7 on a celery 333 with 64m ram and the system hangs up in the final stage of a shutdown, everytime. if i do a restart it would do so whitout error.
when i do a hard reset to recover the os checks the hard disks, boots and runs like normal. If i try to shutdown again it will hang again but upon an hard reste i will get a CRC error
can anyone help?

[geekd]

What do you mean by hang? You mean you have an ATX power supply, and Mandrake Linux doesn't actually "power down" at the very end, after the "Power down" text appears (at the very end of a shutdown?)

Or do you mean that it never really completely shuts down, and hangs sometime before the "power down" text appears?

When you start up again does fsck run , with the message "hda5 (or whatever) was not properly unmounted, checking" - or does it start up just fine. (fsck is linux's version of scandisk)

do you have an AT or an ATX powersupply?

I used to get a nasty error message at the very end of shutdown using Mandrake 6.0 in an AT case. It was trying to power down an ATX case, and couldn't. It never hurt anything, since the entire shutdown process went just fine, up until then. This bug was fixed in Mandrake 6.1.

BTW, I use Mandrake 7.0 also (here at home), and it's great. I use Red Hat 6.1 at work, and Mandrake is a much friendlier environment. They do a nice job of tweaking it out - getting all the little things right.

-geekd

[funsani]

I do have an ATX power supply and yes the system does do a fsck when it restarts and apparently fixes some errors and continues to boot.
It hangs just before the "power down" text appares and other garbled stuff appares along with what i believe to be relevant system info (that means nothing to me)
I tried redhat 6.0 and had the same problems and figured there was some incompatability so i got mandrake.
i used default bios setting and wondered if it was the LBA setting for my HDD that may be causing it.
i like mandrake and i am trying to migrate at work where it works fine. If i can get it to work at home i will do a strange dance and kick windows to the curb

[geekd]

That is odd.

Could you post the last few lines of text you get before it hangs?

-geekd

[furrycat]

As I have said before in these pages, what's happened is a kernel panic. I've had RedHat blow up on ATX motherboards when it should be shutting down in precisely the manner described. I found that recompiling the kernel without APM support solves the problem on RedHat installations. On the other hand, I've had no problem with APM on my Slackware (modified) box at home.

My suggestions would be (in order):

1) recompile the kernel, specifying the APM options you want (probably not many). Don't say "I'm a newbie, I don't want to recompile my kernel" because it's dead easy. There's a graphical configuration interface (obtained with "make xconfig") to make things simple and the whole process is as easy as "make dep; make clean; make bzImage; make modules; make modules_install" followed by some lilo bits (which aren't hard either if you read up on the subject).

2) recompile the kernel without APM support

3) shut the machine down with "reboot" and power off when the BIOS messages reappear.

Solutions 1) and 2) are far superior to 3) and provide the added bonus of teaching you about kernel compilation.

[funsani]

geekd, I don't know how to get the last few lines because i dont see them when all the garbled text goes by.
And as for recompiling the kernel, i might just buy a new motherboard (due for a change anyway http://discussions.linuxplanet.com/smile.gif) and it may put the issue to rest because i just assumed that the problem was a simple one.
thanks guys