[SOLVED] Ubuntu Hanging at Shutdown - Blinking Cursor

How to fix Ubuntu shutdown problem with blinking white cursor by using acpi=force.

I had found this fix once before, but then when I went to look for it, I had to dig for about an hour to find it again, so I'm posting it here. I've seen this both on Jaunty Jackalope and Karmic Koala. The system would try to shut down but it would show "System Halted" but then just have a blinking white cursor and the system wouldn't shut down until you pressed the power button.

This fixed the problem for me:

Modify /etc/modules and added

apm power_off=1

Then I modified /etc/default/grub and added this after quiet splash (this might be /boot/grub/menu.lst if you are running anything prior to Karmic Koala that runs off of the new Grub 2 boot loader)

acpi=force apm=power_off

After saving that file I had to run

sudo update-grub

And that seemed to fix it for me. I'm not sure the /etc/modules modification is necessary. I don't remember doing that the first time, but it was a while ago. Hopefully this helps someone else that is having problems with Ubuntu 9.10 shutting down.

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