# No reboot possible, system hangs on BIOS

## hiroki

Hi!

I have a problem concernign rebooting my gentoo-system. It does not matter which bootloader I use, lilo or grub, my system cannot reboot properly. If I type in reboot, it seems that it really reboots properly, but after rebooting the system hangs at the stage whith the BIOS. 

I've used some other linuxes before, but I never had this problem. Once I had it only with Lilo, that's why I changed to GRUB, but I still have thsi problem.

The BIOS prints a message like "Previous boot was incomplete".

Well, of course it was complete! If I use Windows there is no problem with rebooting, and with other linux versions i used before there werer no problems either. 

I am using Gentoo 1.4rc4 with gentoo-sources 2.4.20r5

I have a Sony Vaio Noteboo PCG-FX401

with AMD Mobile Duron 800 MHz

384 MB SD-RAM

40 GB HDD

well, I don't know what other information could be of interest.

Please help.

I'm going mad always having to disconnect my PC from current and to connect it again an then pushing the power-button. It's a very (!!!) annoying procedure  :Sad: 

Thanks in advance for your help.

hiroki

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## ady

Try disabling the Local APIC option in the kernel.

Processor type and features->Local APIC support on uniprocessors.

This fixes the reboot problem on my vaio fx802

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## hiroki

Hi! I'm afraid, but I don't have this kernel-option, I looked three or four times to be sure, but I have ACPI disabled anyway [And if you really meant 'APIC', then there is no such option either]. But I had another option enabled which was about Power Management. So I switched it off, but it didn't help, even it got worse: The laptop didn't switch off after typing "halt"  :Wink:  so  I had to reenable it. Any other suggestions? Please help, it's a very very annoying problem  :Sad:  HiRoKi

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## ady

What kernel sources are you using?

As far as i know the local APIC option is in all 2.4.x and 2.6-test series kernels. Certainly it is in the current gentoo sources, 2.6-test1 and also it was in the stock mandrake kernels.

The APIC system is seperate from ACPI. APIC is a new type of interrupt controller that is often used in SMP systems.

If you still can't find the option then check the output of dmesg for any mention of APIC using 

```
 dmesg | grep APIC 
```

If you don't see any mention then it is not in your kernel. In that case I can't think of any other known problems.

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## hiroki

wel, as I wrote in my first post, I am using the gentoo-sources (kernel 2.4.20r5)

so, should I change to vanilla or development? Anyway I wanted to try development, so.. I'll try... dmesg | grep APIC returns the following:

 *Quote:*   

> 
> 
> Local APIC disabled by BIOS -- reenabling.
> 
> Found and enabled local APIC!
> ...

 

What shall I do? I really did NOT find the APIC-setting in the kernel menuconfig  :Sad: 

hiroki

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## ady

Well it appears that APIC is your problem.

I have the same kernel source and have the APIC option.

Do you have SMP support enabled? If you do then APIC is enabled and the option removed.

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## NeddySeagoon

hiroki,

On my Gentoo system /sbin/reboot is  link to halt, which, well stops the system without restarting it.

To reboot you need to use /sbin/shutdown -r now.

Halt gets the system down as fast as possible

/sbin/shutdown -h now 

is preferred. That will even turn the power off for you.

If you want the halt command to do a reboot you will need to write a small script that runs the shutdown command above.

Regards,

NeddySeagoon

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## dma

Actually, it just checks to see if it is being called as "reboot", "halt", or "poweroff".  It can do that.

```

NAME

       halt, reboot, poweroff - stop the system.

SYNOPSIS

       /sbin/halt [-n] [-w] [-d] [-f] [-i] [-p] [-h]

       /sbin/reboot [-n] [-w] [-d] [-f] [-i]

       /sbin/poweroff [-n] [-w] [-d] [-f] [-i] [-h]

```

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## nephros

I think a misconception occured here.

When saying "disable local apic" the poster probably meant disabling it at boot time (no need to recompile).

With lilo, this is accomplished by adding

append="noapic"

to /etc/lilo.conf and with grub it's

kernel /vmlinuz-whatever noapic 

in /boot/grub/grub.conf.

No idea if this will fix your problem, but you might try anyway.

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## hiroki

hi!

thanks for all those answers, I'll try some possibilities.

I already tried it with the boot-time option "noapic", but it did not work for me. I don't know why, but my system ignores this "noapic" [i am using grub] and APIC is still turned on. I'll look for an option in the kernel later.

Thanks, I'll tell you whether it's successful oder not. 

And about "halt", well, It always turned the power off. Only as I disables "APM" in the kernel it did not anymore. 

Well, then,

bye,

hiroki

PS: I#ll try my best to get this problem solved.

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## ZX-81

Maybe the kernel option CONFIG_APM_REAL_MODE_POWEROFF will help you.

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## Cossins

The Local APIC option is in Processor Type and Features > Local APIC on Uniprocessors.

It will not appear if you have Symmetric multi-processing support enabled.

- Simon

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