Manually Shutdown / Poweroff XP

[BPO]

Hope someone can help here. The aforementioned is a fully compliant ACPI MB.
I have had it in a homebuilt system for almost a year now. This system has
already toasted 1 Maxtor 60GB hard drive (SMART failure), and last night I
received the "A Disk Read Error Occurred, Press Ctrl+ Alt +Del to Restart"
message for the existing Maxtor 160GB hard drive. I was forced to do a
complete install as the repair option, fixboot option, etc..turned up no
trump. At any rate, here's where I need help:

How can I force XP to power down to a "It Is Now Safe To Turn Off Your
Computer" screen? I want to manually turn off my computer, and no longer
want the OS to do it for me. The reason being, after careful observation I
have noticed that the hard drive LED is still blinking rapidly until the
system power is turned off. There is no way the HD has "parked" before XP
decides to lower the boom on the power supply. I believe this leads to
corruption of the HD, and want to hear the HD spin to a stop before I choose
to power off.

I have looked at the shutdown script area in the policy snap-in. However, I
am not smart enough to construct a script that will do want I need. So,
could someone please help?

 

[Lou]

Try lines 76, 52, 267 at the following site

http://www.kellys-korner-xp.com/xp_tweaks.htm


Hope this helps.

 

[Alex Nichol]

How can I force XP to power down to a "It Is Now Safe To Turn Off Your
Computer" screen? I want to manually turn off my computer, and no longer
want the OS to do it for me. The reason being, after careful observation I
have noticed that the hard drive LED is still blinking rapidly until the
system power is turned off. There is no way the HD has "parked" before XP
decides to lower the boom on the power supply. I believe this leads to
corruption of the HD, and want to hear the HD spin to a stop before I choose
to power off.

That suggests a fault in your Motherboard and its handling of the ATX
Power off signal; in which case it is doubtful if doing that manually
through the machine's Power off will help - you would have to cut power
at the mains supply. To get the pause and 'now safe' message you would
need to disable ACPI.

AFAIK the only safe way to do that is in course of a repair reinstall.
Set the BIOS to boot CD before Hard disk, then boot the XP CD, start
Setup (do not take 'Repair' at this stage), then after the license
agreement take 'Repair Installation'. This will retain your existing
software installations and most settings. But Updates will have to be
run again, especially SP1;
It is important to activate the basic XP Firewall before you ever
connect to the net to get the patches, so as to be protected against
things like the BLAST worm.

At the first reboot, you will get a black screen with a white bar - 'Hit
F6 to install special. . . '. Hit F7 instead; nothing will appear to
happen, but the system will install without ACPI. The alternative APM
will then come up, but disabled. Should you then *want* to support
Power off at shutdown you would need to go to Power Options - APM and
Enable APM

 

[Mark Derbyshire]

BPO came forth with the following in microsoft.public.windowsxp.general

How can I force XP to power down to a "It Is Now Safe To Turn Off Your
Computer" screen? I want to manually turn off my computer, and no
longer want the OS to do it for me. The reason being, after careful
observation I have noticed that the hard drive LED is still blinking
rapidly until the system power is turned off. There is no way the HD
has "parked" before XP decides to lower the boom on the power supply.
I believe this leads to corruption of the HD, and want to hear the HD
spin to a stop before I choose to power off.

Change the computer in Device Manager from an ACPI PC to a Standard PC. I
did this for another problem I had with a vidoe card but now I have to shut
down at the "It Is Now Safe To Turn Off Your Computer" screen using the
power button

 

[BPO]

Well, there's an hour of my life gone forever. Changed ACPI PC to Standard
in Device Manager, the PC rebooted, detected all the hardware again, then
gave me a BSOD. Upon reboot, I was greeted with "Windows could not start
because the following file is missing or corrupt: <Windows
Root>\System32\hal.dll." So, I repaired the XP installation and am back to
square one.

 

[Mark Derbyshire]

BPO came forth with the following in microsoft.public.windowsxp.general

Well, there's an hour of my life gone forever. Changed ACPI PC to
Standard in Device Manager, the PC rebooted, detected all the hardware
again, then gave me a BSOD. Upon reboot, I was greeted with "Windows
could not start because the following file is missing or corrupt:
<Windows Root>\System32\hal.dll." So, I repaired the XP installation
and am back to square one.

Well - say la v

It worked for me so I'm happy and to be honesat I couldn't give a shit

 

[BPO]

For some reason, I am not surprised.

BPO came forth with the following in microsoft.public.windowsxp.general



Well - say la v

It worked for me so I'm happy and to be honesat I couldn't give a shit