I installed Ubuntu 9 to dual boot on my Vista box. It is a Dell XPS410. When I do a shutdown from within Ubuntu, it shuts the computer down as expected. When I hit restart however, it acts like it shuts Ubuntu down then goes to a black screen where it says:
801.648244]
Restarting System

Except...it never restarts the system. It hangs until I push the power button off. I know this isn't good for Windows, and I would assume its not good for Linux either. Anybody have any ideas? I can do a shutdown if I have to but it would be nice to be able to just do a restart to get to Vista when I need Microsoft's evil to do something.

how does sleep and hibernate work for you? have you tried switching wireless off before restart attempt?

dmesg | grep acpi


There is a very interesting discussion
http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/f...il/062599.html
... for BSD, but it has pointers for linux.

Suggests there may be a bios/mobo issue. adding "reboot=b" to the kernel line in /boot/grub/menu.lst may be worth a try.

Yeah this issue seems to be with acpi. Putting acpi=force can also solve the problem as with reboot=b. I had this similar issue with dell desktop and acpi=force option made it for me.

despite the advances, the two systems,on the same pc, is an invite to trouble.

Thanks guys, I will give the ACPI option a shot. I know that Open Solaris had a problem related to ACPI when the computer had a SATA hard drive, because Dell sets the SATA up a little weird. Maybe this is similar. I will definitely give it a try and let you know how it goes.
Other than that, dual boot has been working great! Linux is my main OS, and I have Vista to fall back on for Microsoft evilness. I have a laptop running XP as well so I should be covered. I have another laptop running the same distro Ubuntu 9 so I'm good on all fronts.

Reboot=b did fix it but not in the kernel line in my case. I read on another site about a gentleman who had the same issue. He found that when he booted it wiped out the reboot=b entry so he put it into the commented out kopt line in the /boot/grub/menu.lst file. I tried it and I just had a successful reboot! Thanks guys I couldn't have done it without you. I wouldn't have found the article if you hadn't pointed me in the right direction!

Well done - now find someone else to go help.