OS Catalina on my iMac & shut down

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.

Exact same thing happened to me, installed Catalina and 2017 IMac will not do a controlled shutdown, have to hold Howe the power button. Installed on Mac Mini and no issues. So after talking and screen sharing with Apple advisers nothing worked to resolve the problem. After a data capture it was advised to do a clean install, we did so and now no issue so far. Of course back up all your data you should have an external back up drive always anyway. After dealing with this issue for about 6-8 weeks of trying all the known resets and advise from forums my conclusion is this. First don’t blame Apple their service is second to none and faulting a company for continued progress is just silly. When you have a computer it is no doubt going to be full of data from multiple sources. Apple does it’s best in trying to accommodate all of it, but of course a new OS can’t be expected to work with any and all the crap we have on our computers. My guess is there I just some small fragment of data that the new OS can’t deal with and causes this problem. So back up your stuff and do a clean install and your computer will run better, faster and shut down properly again. Apple is more than happy to help, amazing service and special thanks to Russay.

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.

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!

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 upgraded my iMac Pro to Catalina 10.15.4 last week and had the same problem with not being able to shut down from the menu bar. I have two external drives. A 2TB exclusively for my Time Machine back-ups. I also have a 1TB SSD used for project files. I had used that drive to back-up my son's new Macbook Pro using time machine.

All I did to be able to successfully shut down, using only the menu bar, was to eject the 1TB SSD that was used to back up the laptop. I even tried leaving Chrome app open. Still worked. Shuts down and shuts down quickly. No issues.

Maybe the second drive being recognized as another time machine causes some confusion for the system as it attempts to shut down using the iOS...

My issue is solved and I am not seeing any crashes or issues with other applications so far. As of now, I am sticking with Catalina.

I found the solution. I removed my timemachine backup and made a new one. Since then, when I shut down my mac and there isn't a backup being made, it works fine.

My mac pro is also late 2013, and I had the same issue.

Did you completely remove your time machine backup? Stopping it wasn't enough. I had to delete the backup, and make a whole new backup. It took a couple of days deleting it and making a new one on my NAS.

I think that resets the backup, otherwise mac keep on trying to add to a timemachine backup based on your old OS.

Be sure not to shut down your computer until it is deleted and replaced with a complete new backup.

Yes, at the terminal prompt type:

killall dock

And if that doesn't fix it try:

defaults delete com.apple.dock; killall dock

The second command zaps all the dock settings to default - so if you have tailored the dock (previously) then you have to re-tailor it.

Haven't succumbed to such drastic measures yet - the user has only reported the problem once (so very intermittent).

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.

I had this problem too - my iMac 27", late 2012 after installing Catalina would not shut down properly - sometime at all, sometime through a sequence of black screen, followed by a start up screen where I had to click shut down button again. And it would give me a message at the next start up that computer was not shut down properly. I have tried everything that was suggested here in the forum, but nothing worked. But I had an unexpected fix! After I upgraded Ram to 32gb the problem was gone! Now it shuts down right away!! And no error messages! One detail that could be important: I moved my old RAM to slots #2 and 4, and installed the new modules to slots #1 and #3

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.

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.

Ouch, what a lot of problems in one machine!

Do you have a valid Time Machine backup from when you were running Mojave? This would give you an option to go back to Mojave. If not I think if you search the OS X Daily site (http://osxdaily.com) there is an article about how to revert to Mojave - get the old Mojave download and make a bootable USB drive. Re-installing Mojave from the USB will not touch your data. I have a USB drive of Mojave, but it's at the office in London (not at home with me).

If you have a Time Machine disk has it done a full backup since installing Catalina? This may seem a daft question, but one of my client's iMac hadn't after 2-weeks!! The answer was to wipe his TM disk and start again - NOT something I would advise you to do with your current TM disk - buy a new one if you want to go this way. You need to preserve your data from just before your Catalina update (assuming you requested a TM backup before the update).

My wife had an Internet problem with Safari on her MacBook Pro, she would get trapped in a loop where every action resulted in 'Safari can't load the page' message. Restarting Safari sometimes didn't help, I eventually cleared cache (you have to enable the Developer tab in Safari Preferences) and then cleared Cookies from the BBC (this was the troublesome website) and that seems to have solved the issue - but we wait and see.

Yes that is correct - erased the drive. After the problem reoccurred I stuble upon what I thought was the fix. When this problem first emerged we were advised to shutdown all running software which we normally do anyway, of course this did not work. However, we have a cannon printer that has a Software Manager that seems to always be on. So we quit this software and the shutdown problem went away for 1-2 weeks, the problem has since re-emerged. We hope Apple finds this problem soon as after many many hours and senior advisors still no resolve. It is an Apple/Catalina problem for sure and they owe it to us to fix it. 10.15.4 is now in Beta testing we will wait for the full release and see if that fixes the problem. We can also say with some certainty our iMac runs slower since Catalina. We had to throw out our last iMac because of the black screen of death... so if this issue is not resolved we make think about abandoning Apple after been exclusive users for over 30 years.