Reboot cycle after shutting down from linux
 

I have a very odd issue that is driving me nuts. I have an Acer 5735Z laptop. Everything works great in linux, with one exception: Frequently (it's rare when it works normally) if I shut down from linux, my laptop will not come back on. POST never appears, and it reboots. The HDD light comes on, power light comes out, fans and HDD spin up, and immediately shuts down and repeats. It's almost as if its trying to resume instead of boot.

This only happens after shutting down from linux. It even happens from a LiveCD. The only fix after it does this is to remove the battery for a few seconds. Then it boots fine.

I don't even know where to look to find the cause on this, and I haven't been able to find anything online. If someone can point me in a general direction of where to look or what might cause this, I'd greatly appreciate it.

My guess is some basic error that was always there or some esd damage that is causing some gate to stay in some state.

I'd doubt you can find or fix it but just for grins be sure to look at power options in bios. Be sure no recover from power setting is enabled (may not have it, usually servers have that)

Yeah, there's not much in the BIOS. Acer locked it down good. All I can change is boot order, splash screen, and BIOS passwords.

I am willing to accept a hardware fault (I did buy it for cheap from the Best Buy private auction) except it works fine with Windows. I've never had a problem shutting down or resuming or anything from Windows. Shut down from linux, and it won't come back. I remember I searched a lot a few months ago and the closest I came to a solution was something along the lines of Linux writing something somewhere that made the BIOS think it needs to load a hibernate file, which doesn't exist causing it to reboot endlessly until I remove the battery and it clears that setting. That's probably not right, but that's vaguely what I remember.

What really baffled me was that even shutting down from a LiveCD (Parted Magic, I'm trying to resize my one Win7 partition to give me room to put linux on it, right now it just has Windows 7) caused this problem and now I'm hesitant to put linux on it again. Maybe this is related, but right now I can't resize my partition because GParted says I have a bad sector and that it won't let me resize. I've run chkdsk twice now (all passed with no errors), and it still says there are bad sectors and it won't resize the disk. Think the hard drive could be bad/going bad and causing this oddity?

Have you tried defragmenting the windoze partition? gparted cannot resize a fragmented ntfs partition.