strange reboot/shutdown problem

[mcrobotics]

I've recently come across a problem with my girlfriends deasktop. It was initially installed with a 2004.3 liveCD and everything worked fine until my house mate decided to be a nice guy and wrote a small script so that she could give the system halt/reboot commands from a normal user (using sudo). Now it dosn't like to reboot or halt, even from root. What happens is the command is given (reboot, halt, shutdown -r now.....all produce the same symptoms) and the system makes like it's powering down as per normal, but it gets to a point where it says "System Halted" then comes up and says "Unmounting file systems..." followed by "mounting remaining filesystems readonly..." and freezes solid. I tried updating to a new kernel (was 2.6.9, now 2.6.12) and then updated everyting I could (baselayout, etc.), but with no luck. But now, when I call the appropriate command, it does the same thing as before but I can hit ctrl+alt+del and it reboots as if hitting the reset switch. What's really weird is that if I hit enter it appears as if bash comes back up!?!?? Granted no commands do anything at this point, but it's weird none the less. Short of a reinstall, is there any help for this?
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[Immortal_x86]

Hi,

I'm really not getting the point what the problem is :)
Is it still the problem with rebooting or only that you cannot hit crtl+alt+del for rebooting?

If the script of your "house mate" is still available on your system it would be nice if you
could post it here or try to remove it. :) Also what is the problem about rebooting as normal
user, doesn't your girlfriend use a graphical environment with a graphical display manager
like xdm, gdm or kdm?

Final question for the moment...
Does your /etc/inittab still contain something like this?

[mcrobotics]

The problem is that the system dosn't seem to want to shutdown or reboot after having left it alone for a weekend. It was initially installed with a 2004.3 live cd and worked fine. But now it dosn't want to. It acts like it's shutting down/rebooting fine then says it's trying to remount remaining file systems readonly after it states "system halted." I can hear the hard drives power down when this happens, when that happens if I hit ctrl+alt+del it acts as if I'm hitting the reset switch. I've tried updating everything form the base layout to the kernel.

[syg00]

Try "poweroff" as a command instead of shutdown or reboot.
I had the same symptoms for a while (2.6.9-ish), but it recently cleared up (2.6.11-ish maybe).

Never found out why it happened, or why it went away ...