AOA150 reboots instead of shutdown when plugged in

My hard drive is failing so I was getting ready to re-build the system from scratch. I flashed the bios to v3310 and everything seemed great until I tried to shutdown the netbook. It would shutdown for about 2 sec and then reboot again. It took me a long time to figure out that as long as I had the ac adapter plugged in, this behavior would continue. If I unplugged the netbook, it would shutdown normally (ie stay shutdown). I tried flahing the bios back to 3309 but the same behavior happens on that bios too. It seems like I would have noticed this before, I have had this netbook for a long time. Is this normal behavior? Or is more than just my hard drive failing?

 

It's not normal behavior. You may have some persistent application or process running in the background that throws the Operating System off.

You don't name your OS, but if XP try creating a desktop shortcut to force a quick shutdown - I use it in preference to the usual slow method, no harm ever:

http://www.tacktech.com/display.cfm?ttid=316

I use this command: %windir%\System32\shutdown.exe -s -f -t 00

Google to find sites that list other command handles to try. If even the force method fails to shut it down, you have more serious issue. If it works, you can look for the problem in your running processes.

 

You are correct, I should have mentioned OS, but more specifically that it doesn't seem to matter what OS I use. The behavior is the same, so I do not believe it to be operating system related. I had Win 7 Ultimate installed at first, then slicked my failing hard drive and installed the latest Ubuntu Netbook Remix, and even put ubuntu live cd on a usb drive and booted from there. In each situation a normal shutdown from the OS results in a reboot when the netbook is plugged in, and a normal shutdown when not plugged in. That's why I was thinking it was bios related. I am kind of hoping that perhaps the boot record region of the hard disk is corrupt and is causing this issue but 1. i am able to boot into whatever os i install, and 2. even the usb key boot has the same problem...

I have a WD 500GB replacement hard drive in my Amazon cart, about $55 investment to fix the obvious hard drive issue and hopefully maybe this reboot issue too... It is harder to justify throwing money at a netbook tho when they are so cheap to begin with.

 

As I read your first post again, it sounds as if the issue doesn't happen on battery power alone, only with AC plugged. Sounds like it could be a hardware problem in that AC jack / power switch circuitry, i.e. that may have nothing to do with the HDD. I leave mine on Suspend for days at a time, and it sounds like you can shut it down by yanking the AC first - but I'd probably not be putting money into a machine that might just be wearing out mechanically, like "what's next?"