restart hangs, shutdown fine.

[J. P. Gilliver (John)]

Dell Precision M20, Windows XP SP3.

Shutdown - works fine.

Powers up and run fine.

Restart - gets past "Logging off", including playing of shutdown sound;
next screen is "Windows is shutting down ..." which it stops at for
ever. Strange one this. I have googled and found others who have
problems with restart, but their problems are mostly with the restart,
e. g. stopping at the BIOS screen or similar. We aren't getting as far
as that - it's hanging during the shutdown itself.

When selecting shutdown rather than restart, it goes through logging
off, saving your settings, shutting down - and then actually does turn
itself off.

Windows XP Pro.
--
J. P. Gilliver. UMRA: 1960/<1985 MB++G()AL-IS-Ch++(p)Ar@T+H+Sh0!:`)DNAf

Last week, face cream. This week, the search for life on Mars. Never let it be
said /Horizon/ doesn't probe the frontiers of sciemce. - David Butcher, Radio
Times 28 July-3 August 2012.

 

[J. P. Gilliver (John)]

It means that there is a service that is still running or
one that has not completely shut down. It could be linked
to device that is still communicating with Windows or even
the Internet or hard drive activity, possibly an HD cache
that has not been flushed, especially to an external USB
drive, for example.

Prior to going through a restart, shut down all apps first
and disconnect from all external, removable devices.

GR

Thanks, but I can't see why that allows shutdown to complete, even
passing through the same stage. It is only when Restart, specifically,
is selected, that it hangs, at "Windows is shutting down".
--
J. P. Gilliver. UMRA: 1960/<1985 MB++G()AL-IS-Ch++(p)Ar@T+H+Sh0!:`)DNAf

Jurassic-period viewers like me for whom /The Flintstones/ was actually a
fly-on-the-wall documentary series. - Alison Graham in Radio Times 3-9 March
2012

 

[Zaphod Beeblebrox]

On a restart, not all processes may be shut down. Some may stay
active. On a shutdown, the PSU goes to idle, and the motherboard
is powered down. This is a "hard" stop. The subsequent start-up
of the computer is known as a "cold" start.

A re-start invokes a "soft" stop and re-start; the PSU stays on
and the motherboard remains powered. If a process or application
does not recycle through a stop, then the system will hang on the
re-start until the process or app eventually times-out.

I call shenanigans.

You clearly have no real understanding of how a restart works with
respect to software - *no* OS processes or applications continue
running through a shutdown and restart. Yes, there are differences
between a shut down and power off and a shutdown and restart from the
hardware perspective, but not from the software perspective.

--
Zaphod

Adventurer, ex-hippie, good-timer (crook? quite possibly),
manic self-publicist, terrible bad at personal relationships,
often thought to be completely out to lunch.

 

[Paul]

Sorry for not being too clear in my explanation.

On a restart, not all processes may be shut down. Some may stay
active. On a shutdown, the PSU goes to idle, and the motherboard
is powered down. This is a "hard" stop. The subsequent start-up
of the computer is known as a "cold" start.

A re-start invokes a "soft" stop and re-start; the PSU stays on
and the motherboard remains powered. If a process or application
does not recycle through a stop, then the system will hang on the
re-start until the process or app eventually times-out.

GR

When an OS shuts down, it:

1) Attempts to terminate processes. This is so there won't
be any open files on the file systems. The OS sends a polite
"please stop" to the process first, so the open files
will be released. The OS then gives it fifteen seconds, and
hammers the process, if it won't listen. If the process listens
to the "please stop", any open files might be properly closed.
2) Unmount file systems. This is necessary so the file
system is shut down "clean" and there is no pending
"dirty bit" seen on the next boot. When done right, there
is no CHKDSK activity to be seen on the next boot.
3) When all processes are terminated, all file systems
cleanly unmounted, all that remains is to execute a
processor RST instruction (which gets stretched into
the second or two long RESET pulse). Or, to turn off
the PS_ON# signal. The mechanism for this, is different
in the APM days, than in the current ACPI power management
environment. The BIOS may play a part in this step, and
the BIOS may be the last thing alive on the computer.

When the RESET pulse is present, no code is running.

No process "rides through" a RESET pulse.

What happens after RESET is de-asserted, is the BIOS
starts running, at a known address (the jump address
after a RESET). And the first instruction is going to come
out of the BIOS Flash chip. No OS is running at that point,
no OS scheduler, and with no OS scheduler, no processes
are running either.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reset_vector

*******

If a system crashes during shutdown, the shutdown
sequence may have aborted. Something may be recorded in
Event Viewer. And the system did not really shut down.
So in that case, the OS wasn't reloaded, many of the
processes previously running, might still be there.
But it wasn't really a shutdown. A user must be
careful to distinguish between an aborted shutdown,
and a successfully completed one.

To give an example of careful analysis, say you select
"Hibernate", the screen goes black, and when the
Windows screen comes back, the OS is running but the
hibernated processes aren't there. In that case, we'd
assume a crash happened, and the OS actually rebooted
after a kernel panic. And then, go looking for evidence
of it.

Some computing systems have features such as "reset reason"
registers, to make tracing how a system got rebooted or reset,
as a means of collecting forensic evidence. I don't know
if Windows and the PC architecture have this. The
gear we used to design, did. If done well, it makes
it easier later, to collect evidence of why you found
your PC sitting idle with the screen on, in the morning.
As it stands now, all we've got is things like Event Viewer,
or finding a dump file somewhere.

Paul

 

[Andy]

Dell Precision M20, Windows XP SP3.



Shutdown - works fine.



Powers up and run fine.



Restart - gets past "Logging off", including playing of shutdown sound;

next screen is "Windows is shutting down ..." which it stops at for

ever. Strange one this. I have googled and found others who have

problems with restart, but their problems are mostly with the restart,

e. g. stopping at the BIOS screen or similar. We aren't getting as far

as that - it's hanging during the shutdown itself.



When selecting shutdown rather than restart, it goes through logging

off, saving your settings, shutting down - and then actually does turn

itself off.



Windows XP Pro.

--

J. P. Gilliver. UMRA: 1960/<1985 MB++G()AL-IS-Ch++(p)Ar@T+H+Sh0!:`)DNAf



Last week, face cream. This week, the search for life on Mars. Never let it be

said /Horizon/ doesn't probe the frontiers of sciemce. - David Butcher, Radio

Times 28 July-3 August 2012.

I think there are other logging functions to get more details of the startup
process as well as setting debug options to log errors in program execution, and just in time debuggers options.etc.Crash dumps help also.

The WindowsUpdate.log which has a ton of info.

It's a shame that more programmers don't utilize the Event Viewer functions that send error scripts to the event logs. It's isn't that much more programming.

Take care,

Andy

 

[J. P. Gilliver (John)]

I think there are other logging functions to get more details of the startup
process as well as setting debug options to log errors in program

I'm pretty certain it _isn't_ the _startup_ process that's the problem
here, since the freeze happens at the "Winows is shutting down" screen.
Both Restart and Shut Down reach that point; Restart gets no further,
Shutdown does get to the point where the system shuts itself down. (On
subsequent - manual - powerup, there is no obvious indication [like a
disc scan or similar) that the previous shutdown was anything bur
normal.)