After shutting down by typing "sync" and then "init 0 or shutdown -h now" towards the end I get tons of hex numbers scrolling by my screen then finally comes to a halt. Then when I press ctrl + alt delete it finally says, "stopped all md devices" and then reboots. I have tried multiple installs with different configurations. I have shut down daemons etc. etc. trying to figure out what is causing the problem. I have reformatted the hard drive several times. Scandisked it it has no hardware errors although I believe this is a software issue. I am using a WD 4.0 EIDE gig hd with no other OS's on it.
What processor and motherboard chipset are you using?
It's most likely oopsing when trying to power off the computer. To work around this, remove the '-p' from the last line of /etc/rc.d/init.d/halt.
*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 5872 ***
Another report of this bug, removing '-p' from the halt script did not help. Motherboard: Gigabyte GA586AX F2 CPU: AMD K6-3/400 BIOS: Award 4.51PG Video card: Diamond Viper AGP V550 8MB 1.95e4904 Hard drive: Western Digital 20 Gb 7200 RPM EIDE WD205BA Network card: Intel Etherexpress Pro+ pci 10/100 Customer shuts down with 'shutdown -h now'. Process hangs at 'Power Down' output line. The only way out is to Ctrl+Alt+Del, which prints "Stopping all md devices" then reboots. Turned off all APM features in BIOS, booted with apm=off as boot parameter. Still same behavior.
Um, if it hangs after power off, that means it did what it's supposed to, especially if APM power off is turned off.