NVIDIA freeze on restart - Zorin OS 18.1 - ASUS ROG laptop

Hardware Support
1

Problem: When I press restart, the Zorin logo appears with the hexagon animation blinking repeatedly, then freezes. The system never completes the restart. I have to force shutdown by holding the power button, then manually power on again to access the system. Normal shutdown and cold boot work fine — the issue only occurs on restart.

System:

  • Laptop: ASUS ROG
  • OS: Zorin OS 18.1
  • GPU: NVIDIA (drivers installed during setup with "Install third-party software" option)

What I tried:

  1. Added nvidia.NVreg_PreserveVideoMemoryAllocations=1 to GRUB_CMDLINE — no fix
  2. Disabled nvidia-suspend, nvidia-hibernate, nvidia-resume services — no fix
  3. Added nvidia-drm.modeset=1 to GRUB_CMDLINE — no fix
  4. Created a systemd service to unload NVIDIA modules (modprobe -r nvidia_uvm nvidia_drm nvidia_modeset nvidia) before reboot — no fix
  5. Added reboot=acpi to GRUB_CMDLINE — no fix

I tried those things with claude but i cannot fix it

2

when it does that hit the esc key to see what is holding up the restart...in my case it was the printer service needing a restart...dont know if you have a printer connected but look in the esc key to see whats not shutting down and on a delayed shutdown timer

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3

I agree with being suspicious of Nvidia - it can refuse to dump the vRAM, causing this issue.
But unloading Nvidia before reboot did not help - so it is prudent to look at other causes at this point.
Can you try (You may need to remove the reboot=acpi that you added to grub file, first):

reboot=pci

And if that is no good, try:

reboot=efi

4

Hello and welcome,
You can tale a look in Software & Updates if there is a newer driver for your Nvidia

5

I have changed acpi to what you suggested but it didn't work. Then I tried changing "quiet splash" to "nomodeset" and it worked. I also updated the NVIDIA drivers, blacklisted "nouveau", "rtsx_pci" and "rtsx_pci_ms" (the SD card reader was causing a separate boot loop). It works for now, thank you all for your responses.

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6

Do you want to mark your post #5 as :white_check_mark:Solution if considered fixed?

7

Update: After updating the Nvidia drivers and adding pcie_aspm=off to the GRUB kernel parameters, the reboot issue was resolved. Blacklisting the SD card reader module did not fully fix it — the same issue reappeared. Adding the GRUB parameter was the complete solution.

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