[vox-tech] a reboot powers off machine

[Shwaine]

On Tue, 9 Dec 2008, Scott Miller wrote:

> Ok here's a good one, if you have any ideas. Machine is a circ 1999
> Pentium II 400Mhz Gateway running Debian Lenny. Two IDE drives in RAID
> 1. This is my home server.
>
> Issuing 'sudo reboot', 'init 6', 'shutdown -r now', etc. powers off
> the machine. No reboot. At the end, the last message I see is:
>
> Will now Halt
>
> Do you have any ideas? There are pretty much zero options in the BIOS.
> The only thing having to do with power is to enable or disable BIOS
> power management. I've tried turning that off, but it makes no
> difference here.
>
> All logs seem to look normal and fine. I can't seem to find anything
> hanging, or that would be causing it to power off instead of reboot.
> Maybe this thing is too old to have proper power management?
>

I had somewhat of the inverse situation with a new Dell machine where 
issuing halt would not halt the machine. It turned out to be some 
"automagic" detection that the kernel was doing to determine how to reboot 
and halt Dells was not working correctly on that machine. The file 
involved in the kernel is arch/i386/kernel/reboot.c. Depending on what 
version of the kernel you are running (since you didn't say if you'd 
updated that from the default), there will be varying levels of this 
automagic detection and it might have more than just Dells on the list. My 
solution was to send the option "reboot=bios" to the kernel on booting. 
This overrides the automagic detection. There are other arguments to that 
option (see reboot.c for a list) that may be needed on your system.

Melissa