HP Pavillion does not power off

[Jerry Marles]

On Thu, 2009-11-26 at 23:02 +0000, Jerry Marles wrote:
> On Tue, 2009-11-24 at 13:09 -0500, Jung-uk Kim wrote:
> > On Sunday 08 November 2009 05:41 am, Jerry Marles wrote:
> > > Hello,
> > >
> > > I have a HP Pavillion desktop PC model g3001.uk. The problem I have
> > > is that halt -p does not power it off. The light on the power
> > > button goes off but I can hear that it is still running. If I hold
> > > down the power button for a few seconds the power can be heard to
> > > go off but then it boots right back up again. Windows and Linux can
> > > power it off successfully.
> > 
> > I have a hunch that your SSDT is broken.  In fact, it looks little 
> > unusual.  Have you tried to update your BIOS?  You seem to have two 
> > year old BIOS and it claims it only complies with ACPI 1.0, which has 
> > been dead for many years. :-)
> > 
> > BTW, 'holding down power button for a few seconds' performs emergency 
> > shutdown sequence, which is usually done without ACPI intervention.
> > 
> > Jung-uk Kim
> 
> That sounded like a reasonable idea so I checked and found that there is
> a more recent bios available. I downloaded it and attempted to install
> it and it said that it would not install because I am not running Vista.
> I scrapped Vista shortly after buying the PC for obvious reasons. I got
> the PC cheap because it only had 512Mb of memory and Vista, Not a good
> combination but not a problem to me because I did not intend to use
> Vista. So I thought I would restore the PC using the recovery DVD that I
> purchased for just these sort of circumstances. I took it out of the
> sealed envelope that it came in and tried to boot from it for the first
> time. It ran part way through and failed with a hex code but no error
> message of any use. I expected it to partition and format my primary
> disk but it also did the same to the disk that I had added with Linux
> and FreeBSD on which struck me as excessively destructive. So it totally
> wiped out my PC and still has not given me Vista to enable me to install
> the bios update. Fortunately I have not lost anything of any importance
> because I keep all that on a separate FreeBSD server. My point is that
> if Windows, Linux and Solaris can work work quite happily on this bios
> as it stands then the problemn lies in FreeBSD and that is what I would
> like to solve because that it the operating system that I would choose
> to run if only it could power off my PC. Otherwise Debian seems like the
> best OS for a desktop PC.


The more I try to work this out the more I realise that I have bitten
off more than I can chew. This problem has turned out to be far more
trouble to solve than it is worth to me. I think I will just forget it.
Perhaps I am just not cut out to be a kernel hacker. I will continued to
run FreeBSD on other hardware. I would just like to thank the people
that have tried to help me, it was much appreciated.

Regards

Jerry