I've looked all over the place for this one, but can't find a solution.

I recently installed Kubuntu 7.10 on my IBM T20 laptop. With all the other distros I've thrown at this platform, none have ever failed to properly shutdown and power off. Except for now.

In Kubuntu I've gone to System Settings -> Advanced -> System Administration -> Login Manager -> Shutdown tab (in Administrator mode). I've tried the /sbin/ shutdown, /sbin/stop, /sbin/poweroff, and /sbin/halt entries for the Shutdown dropdown box. In all cases when I select "Turn Off" from the logoff menu selection, the GUI shuts down fine, and all the runs are properly terminated, killed, etc. The message "Will now halt" is displayed, but instead of powering off another error type message is displayed that states "halt: unable to iterate IDE devices: no such file or directory". this is followed by the message "System halted". The system goes quiet, but the power light is still on and the screen still has a display of the last messages. At this point I can press the power button and the power does go off.

This bizarre and maddening, but it seems like there may be a configuration problem somewhere ro some shutdown scripts are honked up.

Where to look?

My first guess would be ACPI..I have had that happen with my desktop too..Sorry I cannot be more specific..
Goodluck,
jolphil

Yeah, I saw that solution in another post somewhere. I put acpi=off into my grub menu.lst file, but no change. Thanks for the response, though!

you should try to delete the 'hddown="-h"' line in your /etc/init.d/halt shutdown script.

I will give that a try!!

In the meantime, based on someone else's suggestion, I added this to /etc/modules:

apm power_off=1

That did result in a complete power down of the system, although I did notice the "halt: ... " notice still being displayed. But I will also look into editing the halt script and test both solutions. Thank you.

UPDATE: I gave your suggestion a try and it worked well. Thanks again.