Someone made kexec-tools handle reboot requests by default seemingly. This allows the system to skip BIOS/POST etc and just drop to a minimal runlevel and start a kernel again.

This is great if you only have debian on your system and particularly great if you spend a lot of time changing kernels – when you issue reboot, or shutdown -r now (etc) kexec-tools intercepts the command and does a warm-restart rather than resetting the machine cold – if you don’t need to, why wait through all the BIOS checks, bootroms, etc, right?

Except some of us reboot because we want to change OS. I’d argue that it should perhaps be the default behaviour to cold-reboot (and the installer could, perhaps, ask!) or that KDE should have a button for “warm restart” and one for “cold reboot” or whatever, but anyway.

If you want to make reboot actually reboot the system you’ll want to:

# dpkg-reconfigure kexec-tools

And tell it to not use kexec-tools to handle reboots. If you’re never going to want kexec-tools, you can probably uninstall it using apt, but I just disabled it. It’s useful on the odd occasion I do want to just upgrade the kernel to enable it, reboot, and disable it again, I suppose.

Some SEO, perhaps?

Debian 6 Squeeze won’t reboot
Debian 6 Squeeze reboot doesn’t go to grub
Debian 6 Squeeze reboot dualboot
Debian 7 Wheezy won’t reboot
Debian 7 Wheezy reboot doesn’t go to bios