Long hang-time on shutdown

[ands]

Hello everyone

Was wondering if someone can assist me in solving a shutdown issue. Im running debian etch, when I issue the command shutdown -h now the machine begins to shutdown but hangs on "asking all remaining processes to terminate" after hours of waiting, and the machine will still not shutdown. This frustrating problem causes me to pull the power cord to turn the machine off.
Does anyone have any idea on how to solve this?

[MikeTbob]

No idea how to solve it, but do you get the same problems if you just issue the reboot command?

[ands]

yes I have, trying the shutdown -r command still has the same effect.

[MikeTbob]

Is it a Laptop? Have you tried disabling acpi? At the boot screen, type acpi=off (press enter)

[ands]

No, its not a laptop, its a server, using sata drivers. There is no raid setup.

Is there anyway of determining what process it is locked on?

[devils casper]

Post the kernel line of /boot/grub/menu.lst file here.

[ands]

the kernel line is

kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.18-5-686 root=/dev/sda1 ro

I have posted on other forums and people seem to think that the HD may be faulty.
Does anyone else have any solutions??

[devils casper]

Try passing acpi=off parameter to kernel.
Highlight Debian title in GRUB Menu and press 'a'. Type acpi=off and hit Enter key.

[ands]

Well from the grub boot loader menu i appended "acpi=off" onto the kernel line. Is this correct?

I was reading somewhere Im not to sure how reliable the source was or if it is even relevant but, my server is running a Phoenix serverbios 3 release 6.0.

Is there any correlation to my current problem.

Appending the kernel line with acpi=off fixed the problem for a single boot. When I try append the acpi=off onto the kernel for the next boot, the same problem presents itself, the server still hangs on boot.

[devils casper]

You have to edit /boot/grub/menu.lst and append Kernel line.