OS Catalina on my iMac & shut down

Reset the SMC, as per > How to reset the System Management Controller (SMC) on your Mac - Apple Support

I love WD drives, but will never ever buy a WD cased drive.

EtreCheck is a simple little app to display the important details of your system configuration and allow you to copy that information to the Clipboard. It is meant to be used with Apple Support Communities to help people help you with your Mac.

http://www.etresoft.com/etrecheck

Pastebin is a good place to paste the whole report...

https://pastebin.com/

Or use the paperclip at the bottom of a Reply to attach the full report here. :)

Workable but harder for me to work with...the Note tool on the bottom of this editor's toolbar, as shown in the image, to copy and paste the output from EtreCheck.

NOPE, already tried that it does not work and Ive also performed NVRAM reset too.

There are bugs in Catalina, its wreaked havoc on my Mac (27-inch, Late 2012). :literally had to remove Firefox and do complete re-install. Safari is buggy, some pages (Twitter, iHeart) won't load after while I have to quit it and restart.

The inability for it to shutdown really bothers me, this must be addressed and YES the machine is set up to automatically send error reports to Apple.

ANYONE?? My iMac is a mess browsers work and then after while they just stop!! force quitting doesnt work at times I have to "restart" but not really bc the machine won't do it so I have to hold power button. Catalina is a disaster how do I uninstall it back to mojave?

I have this problem too, since installing Catalina.

I left it thinking about shutting down for 9 hours once but I woke up to the same desktop image staring back at me. The only way to shut it down is the hold the power button down which then cocks up all my external hard drives.

Catalina has been yet another disaster software release from Apple.

To all the people here with the shutdown problem... do you have an iTunes or Photo library on an external disk at all? I do and i notice that the external disk doesn't make the right noises when the Mac fails to shut down. When it does make the right clicks and farts the Mac seems to shut down ok.

Im wondering if there is some residual connection of some sort between the drive and Mac thats stopping the shutdown.

Same issue here and [for me] has something to do with external drives being mounted at the time of the shutdown. I have two external Time Machine Backup drives attached to my late 2015 27" iMac along with a small NAS server and if I manually eject each drive before I shut down it will shut down normally. If I don't then this happens.

Hopefully Apple will get this sorted out because this is a disaster in my opinion.

I hope that helps someone out there.

I think its something to do with Time Machine too now. I ended up completely erasing my TimeMachine drive and starting again and it fixed it for a time. Then it started again failing to shutdown. I have noticed that even if i try to manually eject a drive sometimes it simply won't do so and I literally have to pull the plug out to which i get the 'did not eject properly' message. I think this is maybe what is happening on shutdown. The drive is failing to eject and so the mac never shuts down.

Thanks to xTOMMY_Tx and Stuart Luff.

Yes, I think it's a TM disk issue too. 3 Macs impacted (2xMini + 1xiMac). Eject/Dismount the TM disk and everything is OK. Had to refresh the TM disk on all three Macs. All TM disks were encrypted, now have to re-encrypt them after the refresh.

On the iMac I couldn't start Disk Utility with the TM disk mounted!

Hello All:

I have this same issue on Mac mini that is late 2012. I do have external drives and a time machine drive. All of my drives are plugged into a USB 3.0 hub that I use to load and eject the drives as I use them. So they typically stay turned off unless I need them. I then use them, eject them when I am done, and turn them off. I have this same issue every time I shut down. What happens for me and that I noticed, I think it is the my mouse. I have an Apple keyboard, but a logitech wireless mouse. I first noticed it as the mac went to shut down, I turn off the mouse button and it froze. I had to hold down the power button. So now I do not turn the mouse off and it will shut down, but issue is also still present. What I noticed too is that the screen jumps on shutdown and that is when it seems to freeze. It is frustrating.

I had the same shut-down issue after upgrading to Catalina. I would think it had shut down, but come back to find it had not, and I had the error message that BMartin1776 illustrated. Sometimes I would try to Restart instead of Shut Down and would have the same issues. Without doing anything in particular, though, the shutdown issue seems to have gone away. (Well, the only thing I did was completely erase my external HD so that Time Machine would work again; not sure if that's related.)

One more thing related to Catalina--my dock disappears sometimes and then reappears unpredictably. This happened immediately after installing Catalina, and when it happens now I shut down and restart and *usually* the dock comes back. I've already looked at my System Preferences and made sure the "automatically hide and show the Dock" command is NOT checked. Sometimes when the dock has disappeared, I go into System Preferences and by moving the Size slider, the Dock will reappear...but only when I'm actively moving the slider. Then it disappears again. This is really ******* me off.

I'd like to refine my previous post and say that the problem (for me) is related to encrypted Time Machine disks. It DOESN'T appear to happen with non-encrypted TM disks because non of the 3 laptops I manage has reported this issue.

You have to completely trash/erase the existing encrypted TM disk and start afresh - or if you want to retain the old TM buy a new USB drive and start afresh.

Having refreshed my Mac mini TM disk, which is actually a 1TB partition within a 2TB Maxtor device, everything shuts down in an orderly manner. I am now in the long process of re-encrypting it.

I never dismount/turn off my connected USB drive and neither do I want to.

I have also trashed the other office based mini and iMac TM disks and they are working fine again - unfortunately non-encrypted currently.

I've also seen the ad-hoc 'disappearing dock' syndrome and I agree with AndreaFromhilo you either reboot or mess around with the size slider and hope it won't disappear. Not guaranteed! Haven't actually found a fix for this problem, but only intermittently happens on one mini.

We have about 10 Macs spread around and this upgrade to Catalina has been the worst overall update experience (Mojave was a breeze) - seems like it was rushed-out to meet a Marketing schedule - get a grip Apple.

Unfortunately we don't have the luxury of having a test system nor the spare resources to fully test upgrades before we commit. But basically these problems are not app specific they are fundamentally Apple core macOS functionality.

I'd like to refine my previous post and say that the problem (for me) is related to encrypted Time Machine disks. It DOESN'T appear to happen with non-encrypted TM disks because non of the 3 laptops I manage has reported this issue.

You have to completely trash/erase the existing encrypted TM disk and start afresh - or if you want to retain the old TM buy a new USB drive and start afresh.

Having refreshed my Mac mini TM disk, which is actually a 1TB partition within a 2TB Maxtor device, everything shuts down in an orderly manner. I am now in the long process of re-encrypting it.

I never dismount/turn off my connected USB drive and neither do I want to.

I have also trashed the other office based mini and iMac TM disks and they are working fine again - unfortunately non-encrypted currently.

I've also seen the ad-hoc 'disappearing dock' syndrome and I agree with AndreaFromhilo you either reboot or mess around with the size slider and hope it won't disappear. Not guaranteed! Haven't actually found a fix for this problem, but only intermittently happens on one mini.

We have about 10 Macs spread around and this upgrade to Catalina has been the worst overall update experience (Mojave was a breeze) - seems like it was rushed-out to meet a Marketing schedule - get a grip Apple.

Unfortunately we don't have the luxury of having a test system nor the spare resources to fully test upgrades before we commit. But basically these problems are not app specific they are fundamentally Apple core macOS functionality.

I don’t have the dock issue but there is a terminal command to kill the dock which might help fix that. It’s along the lines of ‘kill all dock’ and resets it. If I can find it I’ll post it.

Oddly I’ve not had the shutdown issue for a few days now but I’ve done nothing since it last failed to shutdown so I have no idea what’s going on but I’m 100% certain its related to external time machine drive.