Computer restarting when told to shut down

[Krynn72]

I have this computer at work thats pissing me the **** off. Any time you tell it to shut down it just restarts, and any time you put it to sleep it just wakes back up immediately. I've tested the hard drive, reseated the ram, set the bios back to its defaults, and even formatted and reloaded windows, and its still doing it. I'm thinking its a short on the motherboard or something, but I'm really hoping its not because then I'm going to have to send it out, and the guy has already been waiting like a week and a half.

Anyone have any thoughts as to other possible causes?

 

[MuToiD_MaN]

This sounds vaguely familiar to something I might have dealt with in my ancient past. Maybe a case faceplate wire is connected to the wrong thing? Hardware problem with the case itself?

 

[Krynn72]

Oh, I forgot to mention, its a laptop, so that doesn't seem likely.

 

[AtomicSpark]

ACPI is probably ****ed.

 

[ríomhaire]

Perhaps it crashes whenever it shuts down/goes to sleep and is set to automatically restart when it crashes? Try changing that setting.

 

[Dinnesch]

Check if you have your latest chipset drivers installed, or try another version atleast.

 

[Viperidae]

ACPI is probably ****ed.

Either that or the BIOS.

It won't be high level software.

 

[Krynn72]

Perhaps it crashes whenever it shuts down/goes to sleep and is set to automatically restart when it crashes? Try changing that setting.

Check if you have your latest chipset drivers installed, or try another version atleast.

Tried both of these, no dice.

It was sent out today after me and my manager tried many other things. I don't think its something with the BIOS. because I was messing around with it and got no result, and setting it to its default didn't help. I dont know anything about the ACPI though so maybe? Is that something you can edit? We'll see if its something the more experienced guys at the other location can figure out, but in case they don't I'd like to know how to/if I can mess with the ACPI when it gets back.

 

[xcellerate]

First off, will it shutdown properly from safe mode?

Is it windows 7? Right click on my computer, hit advanced tab, 'startup and recovery', then uncheck the 'automatically restart' box under 'system failure'. Maybe the system is crashing during the shutdown process and restarting automatically.

Does it do the same thing if you shutdown from the command prompt? shutdown -s

 

[Krynn72]

First off, will it shutdown properly from safe mode?

Is it windows 7? Right click on my computer, hit advanced tab, 'startup and recovery', then uncheck the 'automatically restart' box under 'system failure'. Maybe the system is crashing during the shutdown process and restarting automatically.

Does it do the same thing if you shutdown from the command prompt? shutdown -s

It does not shut down properly from safemode, its windows vista, I had indeed turned off automatic restart on crashes, and I didn't think to try it from the command prompt. I'm quite sure its not something windows is doing. For one, it appears to shut down properly, it says "shutting down" then fades out to a black screen and a second later everything turns off, including the lights on the computer and the light-ring around the power button. The problem is that a millisecond after everything turns off, it all flicks back on and starts to POST. Thats why I'm thinking it could be a short.

 

[Vegeta897]

All this time you should have been giving it a treat every time it shut down when you told it to shut down. You of all people should know how this works.

 

[Krynn72]

All this time you should have been giving it a treat every time it shut down when you told it to shut down. You of all people should know how this works.

It never once shut down when I told it to. You can't reward good behavior when there's no good behavior.

 

[Adabiviak]

...just throwing this out there: is the power button on the laptop shorted? There are a number of ways that this would present itself that are not what you're experiencing, but at least one of them could be.

 

[ríomhaire]

All this time you should have been giving it a treat every time it shut down when you told it to shut down. You of all people should know how this works.

It never once shut down when I told it to. You can't reward good behavior when there's no good behavior.

Deja vu? Did you guys have this same conversation before or is my brain broken?

 

[Remus]

You're going senile Bill...

 

[Krynn72]

Bumping with the answer, since who knows who might find it.

Turns out it was an extremely odd issue where not using the original AC adapter was causing the issue. If you use the original AC adapter, or turn it off while not plugged in (IE running off battery) then it turned off normal.