Lenovo G780 halts during POST with HDD LED on solid. MATE 16.04

Support & Help Requests
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#1

Background:
Last year I loaded MATE 16.04 with lots of help from this community. I did not and have not experienced too many problems, but have one annoying problem.

Every once in a while, month or so, during power up it just halts during the POST sequence. About the only thing that seems to work is taking out the battery, holding down the power switch for about 30 seconds and that will clear it. But even that takes three or four tries. Even the magic button that is supposed to drive it to basic boot sequence, BIOS setup selection menu did not cure it.

At first I thought it might be the Crucial SSD was causing the problem because it wasn’t set right in the power sequence. So I changed it to never power down (Crucial recommendation). That seemed to help some, but the problem continued. So last month I bought a Samsung 850 EVO cloned it from the Crucial and everything was going great for almost a month.

BTW: I had AC Power and Battery settings in Power Management Settings set to Shutdown.

I have noticed that most times when I shut down using the icon top right corner, then Shutdown in the popup menu it takes about 5 to 10 seconds to actually totally power off. On rare occasions it takes upwards of 20 to 30 seconds. In my impatience I just close the lid.

Finally the question:
Since I have already started an orderly shut down sequence through software, is it possible that the lid action interrupts that sequence and simply cuts power causing a disorderly sequence and maybe causing my intermittent dead at POST problem?

BTW, today I changed the lid switch to do nothing in Power Management Settings.

Yes, I am reaching for an explanation. I desperately desire to dump Windows, but can’t with a major problem like this.

Thanks, Fred

#2

Hi Fred,

do you have suspend enabled?, if you do, try disabling that and see if things improve!.

See also:

https://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1477500 :smiley:

#3

If the problem you’re having occurs during POST, then it doesn’t have anything to do with Ubuntu MATE. Instead it’s likely to be a hardware issue.

#4

@ouroumov Actually it was a combination hardware/software issue.

Along the way the DVD failed, BIOS can’t even find it. It was no longer in the boot sequence.

BUT 4 days ago setting in my office in total silence as I pressed the power on button, I heard a very, very faint click and the HDD light came on solid. Actually it is not just an HDD light, it is a drive access light it turns out.

Anyhow the DVD being closed was first being queried to see if it should be the boot device, even though it was not in the boot sequence but the drive had failed and it was not spinning up, so it just froze. The authors of the BIOS forgot to put in a time-out to overcome failed hardware.

I proved my hypothesis by simply opening the DVD drive, holding down the power button until it shut down. Then pressed it again to power up, which it did. I have probably power cycled 15 times since then and each one was successful.

To further prove that it was the cause, I closed the DVD drive and it hung. Used a paper clip to open the drive, did a power cycle and it started up just fine.

Problem solved.