Ubuntu – Ubuntu 12.04 won’t shut down

This answer on Ubuntu Forums has the exact solution! (Why didn't I post there in parallel to here on AU? It would have saved a week of calendar time and several hours of computer time!)

The wrong driver is loaded which prevents shutdown. To fix it you need to do this:

Open a terminal and type: sudo modprobe -rf rt2860sta

Followed by: sudo modprobe rt2860sta

Then you need to blacklist the wrong driver:
echo blacklist rt2800pci | sudo tee -a /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf

Once you have rebooted (you will need to do a hard power off for the last time!) you will find you can reboot properly.

I am running Ubuntu 13.10 on my Surface Pro (with touch cover) and I am facing the same problem (which I fixed!)

the shutdown -h now command works after a while, it gets stuck there for 2 or more minutes, my guess is that it forces the shutdown/reboot, which is not good.

The problem is that network-manager does not quit when the signal for KILL is passed to it. You have to stop it before rebooting/shutting down:

I have created a bash script called K99_stopnm on /etc/init.d sym linked under /etc/rc0.d/ and /etc/rc6.d/ as K99_stopnm_sm and it works great, if you press the down arrow when you get the ubuntu splash screen on either reboot or shutdown, you will see this:

shutting down network manager

network-manager stop/waiting
network manager is down

my script looks like this:

#!/bin/bash

echo "shutting down network manager";

stop network-manager;

echo "network manager is down";

sleep 2;

hope this helps and I hope the Ubuntu team can fix this anytime soon

thanks