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Starting from around a week ago, my computer just cannot shut down completely. It looks like its shutting down and the screen goes black but the computer itself does not stop working and the light does not turn off. The status is similar to standby mode, except that it won't start up again when I click the power up button. I need to disconnect the electricity to forcefully shut it down before I can turn on my computer again.

I have tried using the command sudo shutdown -h now to shutdown the computer. The same thing happen. Restarting the computer works fine. At the moment I have to keep my computer on as I don't want to forcefully shut down my computer too many times.

I saw a similar question here, but that was 12 years ago on Ubuntu 10, and there was no real solution under that question as well.

I have do a virus scan using ClamTK and nothing suspicious is found. (except those PUA on my Steam Proton and Brave browsers, which I guess should be safe to omit)

I understand at this stage there may not be enough information to determine what is the underlying problem, but what can go wrong and cause the problem? What should I check?

cytsunny
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3 Answers3

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Do you start any daemons on your system like the Apache Web server, a database server or otherwise during startup, or is it "just" a vanilla system?

If yes - turn them of so they do not startup / shutdown with the system.

Try to unhook all Peripheral physical devices and repeat the process.

Nikolaj Hansen
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Check /var/log/auth.log for any failed permission checks with cat /var/log/auth.log

Might be that a failed check prevents the regular shutdown for the user.

A hint in this direction would be, if the shutdown works fine with sudo shutdown -h now, but not by the regular user or UI function.

[EDIT:] Just noticed, this is not a solution for the description in OP. But it might be useful for similar cases.

HiWiz
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do this to save currently produced system messages ... leave this running as you try to power down

sudo dmesg -w  >  ~/output_dmesg # send real time output from dmesg to file

now do your power down ... afterwards issue

sudo cat ~/output_dmesg # to see system messages which might show clues as to why shutdown fails

watch traffic getting sent to that file while system is up

sudo tail -f  ~/output_dmesg     # view new messages getting sent to dmesg
Scott Stensland
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