XP Hangs on Reboot/Shutdown

[DallasTejas]

My system hangs up just before the actual shutdown or reboot with XP. I get all of the right messages, it gets to the shutdown screen and then nothing. No hard drive activity or anything. I have to manually turn off the machine or hit the reset button.

If I run in Safe Mode, the machine reboots/shuts down fine. Since I rarely have to reboot, this is more of a hassle than a problem. I was able to reboot with ME with basically the same software installed.

My hardware specs are in my profile.

 

[phreakyzen]

Do you get to the "it's safe to shut down screen"?

 

[DallasTejas]

With my setup, the system always automatically shuts down. I've never had to physically press the power button until now. I don't get the "safe to shutdown" screen but I never have. My wife has a similar setup with the ASUS A7V motherboard and her's shuts down/reboots properly. We have the same case/power supply setup (Antec).

My biggest gripe is the fact that I can't auto reboot when I install software. It "almost" gets there but I then have to push reset. I'm not running any power saver stuff in my BIOS (or my wife's machine).

All of this worked when I first installed XP, but I have a conflict somewhere.

 

[phreakyzen]

Look here:

Shutdown Troubleshooter

 

[c0rv1d43]

You mentioned WinME. Are you dual booting, or has the machine been upgraded from WinME to WinXP? If upgraded, how? Did you reformat and install WinXP on a bare drive, or did you upgrade over the WinME installation?

Since you're able to shut down or reboot successfully from safe mode, I'd guess that this has to be a driver issue. Safe mode loads only basic drivers, so any differentiation in the driver loading between safe and normal modes could be the culprit. (That means that even the video driver is a possibility since safe mode loads the "standard" SVGA driver in WinXP.) Are you running any unsigned drivers on the system? The sigverif.exe tool might provide you with a list of suspects. But an install-over upgrade could also be a culprit.

If you always were presented with a safe to shut down message regardless of running mode, then I'd think we were dealing with a non-ACPI hardware abstraction layer. In that case you'd probably want to at least think about a BIOS update (if one happens to be available) and a repair install to change the HAL to ACPI. (But a clean installation would be much better, IMO.) On some systems you have to force an ACPI install.

Can you provide any more info for us?

- Collin

Edit: Dang! You guys posted back and forth to each other while I was composing this teensy message. I'm gettin' old, man!

 

[DallasTejas]

Thanks phreakyzen!

Didn't realise it was such a widespread problem.

 

[Grunt03]

Great information and thanks.....

 

[DallasTejas]

c0rv1d43,

I'm not running a dual-boot system. I am going to try updating my BIOS tonight.

After looking at the mentioned web site, I think it is a either a BIOS problem or an unsigned driver on my Radeon Card. If it's the video driver, I'll just live with it until the next "blessed by XP" version comes out. I upgraded over the one that came on the XP disk since the original didn't support OpenGL.

I'll let ya'll know if the BIOS update helped.

 

[c0rv1d43]

It's a pain to have to choose between features (OpenGL in your case) and stability. I'm thinking it's most likely to be the video drivers. Either way, I hope you find the source of your woes and get a fix for it. And let us know!

BTW, no other unsigned drivers on the system were shown by sigverif.exe?

- Collin