Login Screen instead of Reboot

[Guest]

Hello all,

the following issue is giving us sleepless nights.

On our Minimalsystems one is able to open a taskmanager via some special key
combo and the "runas" command.
To reboot a machine we coded some small program that sets the appropriate
permissions on the current process and uses the "ExitWindowsEx" function to
do the reboot.

Everything worked fine up to a few days ago. Now it is _sometimes_ the case
that the machine does not reboot but logs out the current user and displays a
login screen.
The issue gets even more strange due to the fact that we use flash disks
with write protection for storage of the OS and its data. After a reboot the
system comes back again in a clean state as it was before. I haven't been
able to reliably reproduce the problem mentionend above.

Does anybody have a clue which setting or anything else might be responsible
for this problem to occur?

If I left out important information please feel free to ask. I will provide
you with the necessary information as soon as possible.

Many thanks and regards
Jens

 

[Adora Belle Dearheart]

Hello all,

the following issue is giving us sleepless nights.

On our Minimalsystems one is able to open a taskmanager via some special key
combo and the "runas" command.
To reboot a machine we coded some small program that sets the appropriate
permissions on the current process and uses the "ExitWindowsEx" function to
do the reboot.

Everything worked fine up to a few days ago. Now it is _sometimes_ the case
that the machine does not reboot but logs out the current user and displays a
login screen.
The issue gets even more strange due to the fact that we use flash disks
with write protection for storage of the OS and its data. After a reboot the
system comes back again in a clean state as it was before. I haven't been
able to reliably reproduce the problem mentionend above.

Does anybody have a clue which setting or anything else might be responsible
for this problem to occur?

If I left out important information please feel free to ask. I will provide
you with the necessary information as soon as possible.

Many thanks and regards
Jens

Is there any reason you're using your own rebooter rather than xpepm?

 

[Guest]

Is there any reason you're using your own rebooter rather than xpepm?

xpepm is not included in our image. Besides we must have the opportunity to
issue a reboot from 3 different programs written by us and ShellExecute is
not an option.
Is there any reason why ExitWindowsEx should not work? Or the other way
round: What is doing xpepm different from ExitWindowsEx?

 

[Adora Belle Dearheart]

xpepm is not included in our image. Besides we must have the opportunity to
issue a reboot from 3 different programs written by us and ShellExecute is
not an option.
Is there any reason why ExitWindowsEx should not work? Or the other way
round: What is doing xpepm different from ExitWindowsEx?

Not a clue. I don't do the coding here, so anything that involves having
code written is a delay, so I tend to avoid it.

 

[KM]

Jens,

When ExitWindowsEx fails to reboot the machine do you see anything in Event Log?
Do you set EWX_FORCE flag while calling the API?

If it stopped working suddenly, did you happen to install some custom app(s)/driver(s) recently on your image?

You can try InitiateSystemShutdown API instead.

Or you can use undocumented NtShutdownSystem, although be careful with it as it is not going to do a graceful shutdown.
http://undocumented.ntinternals.net/UserMode/Undocumented Functions/Hardware/NtShutdownSystem.html