Dell Reboot Performs Shutdown Issue

Introduction

Recently, I got a new Dell Precision 7875 Tower Workstation. However, every time I reboot the workstation, it does shutdown instead. This is a very annoying issue, because I will not be able to reboot the workstation remotely via SSH.

In this blog post, I will share my experience on how to fix the reboot issue.

Dell Reboot Performs Shutdown Issue

The Dell Precision 7875 Tower Workstation was installed with Ubuntu 24.04 LTS. I tried rebooting the workstation using the command sudo reboot and the GUI reboot button, but the workstation always performed a shutdown instead of a reboot. I also tried commands such as sudo reboot -f and sudo shutdown -r, but the result was the same. I also checked all the BIOS settings, but I could not find any settings that could be related to the reboot issue.

It turns out that the reboot issue was fixed by updating the BIOS to the latest version. In Ubuntu 24.04 LTS, I was updating the BIOS using the Firmware Updater tool natively from the operating system. Once the firmware was downloaded, the workstation has to be rebooted to have the firmware installed. There was a progress bar under the Dell logo showing the progress of the firmware installation. After the progress bar reached 100%, the workstation became black screen but the power indicator was still on. I was worried that the workstation was bricked, but after about 5 minutes, the workstation showed the Ubuntu login screen, indicating that the firmware update was completed and successful.

After updating the BIOS, the workstation was able to reboot normally. The BIOS version I am currently using is 01.11.02 which was just released on February 14, 2025.

References

• Server Shuts Down Instead of Reboot and Can’t Be Remotely Awaken