boot problem

[Ethyriel]

Ok, then go ahead and remove the parameter if you haven't already.

What make and model is this laptop? Is the Windows install from the factory? What programs have you used for partitioning?

[vale]

My laptop is a compaq presario x1000. XP is reinstalled by me. Until yesterday I had a efficient dual boot with XP and Red Hat 9. Yesterday I removed red hat and installed ubuntu.

[Ethyriel]

Ok, I'm looking around, try acpi=force where I had you put acpi=off before, and look around in your BIOS for ACPI and APM related stuff.

Oh, by the way, did you see about this recall?

[Ethyriel]

It looks like the reboot on shutdown problem is a kernel bug with 2.6.9. Try upgrading to a new kernel if there is one in the Ubuntu repository. The bug is fixed in 2.6.10 I believe, and there's also a patch for 2.6.9, but I have no idea if it's made it into an Ubuntu kernel. If nothing else, you can detach your power cable when you want to shut down, or compile your own kernel.

Kernel Bug 3696

I think your reboot into Windows problem may be a known partition table bug, but I've never seen it manifest itself like this, so I'm going to look a little deeper.

[Ethyriel]

I'm probably wrong about that partition table bug.

Check out the thread from this mailing list post, here are a few rips:

quoting Alan Cox (on linux-scsi):

Always power off a PC between OS changes. It shouldnt be needed but
it often is.

I have this same problem on my Compaq Presario. I think that this
is because the BIOS was shadowed and used some writable-RAM somewhere.
Linux seems to do a 'warm-boot'. The result being that some of the
stuff that the BIOS counts on was wiped out by Linux, i.e.,
stuff from E000:0000 -> E000:FFFF (the BIOS is normally at F000:0000).

The reason for the problems is that Windows is expecting the hardware to be
in a certain state at boot which is not present after Linux reboots because
it has initialized the devices differently.

Conclusion? Try disabling BIOS shadowing, and if that doesn't do it, get used to power cycling. If it's a problem for you, I suspect the reason it was working fine with RH9 is something to do with your hardware and the 2.4 kernel (or were you on 2.6?). If I'm right about that, then go back to the 2.4 kernel, but you won't be able to use Ubuntu or anything that depends on project utopia (Gnome... I think 2.8+, for example).