OS Catalina on my iMac & shut down

How could it backup with no external 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 if you capture the URL while there…

https://pastebin.com/

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.

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 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.

Mine does this to, as well as not loading the internet any more and quitting out of photos unexpectedly.

my computer is for all intents and purposes completely unusable now that I’ve downloaded Catalina.

The support person at the local Apple shop suggests I wipe it completely and start again.

as I’m a photographer this means several shoots on my computer may not be able to be saved - since the machine works so slowly it’s hard to locate and copy them to an external drive.

my advice is if you haven’t yet done it do not download Catalina!

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 ***** up all my external hard drives.

Catalina has been yet another disaster software release from Apple.

I did back it up after I installed Catalina - took more than five hours and it’s not possible to view the contents of my iBook backup drive as my computer is too glitchy now to do so.

I might take my iBook with me when I go back into the Apple store and see if the fellow there can check it. I wonder if he’d be able to reinstall the previous operating system from previous backups on the same drive?

It's useless. You can erase your TM disk and start over again, but when the encryption is finally completely done the problem will come back. I think Catalina really is a mess. Apple shouldn't have released such a buggy OS in the first place. Maybe Apple is really losing its touch.

Because of this I no longer use timemachine. It’s sad because Apple are breaking more and more stuff and I’m slowly being pushed onto 3rd party stuff that actually works. Give it a couple more disasters like Catalina and I’ll be onto Windows unfortunately. I’ve stopped updating my phone and iPad as not to break them so slowly I’m being pushed out the apple garden of which I’ve been happily living in for the past 20 or so years, the funny part is I’m being pushed by Apple themselves.

They need to refocus, trim product lines and start specialising again.

iMac late 2015 ever since Catalina 3 months ago computer won’t shutdown without holding the power button. Did all the resets and then some. Complete system reinstall, many hours with senior advisors. Was told that it is 100% not a hardware issue and that it is 100% a software issue. Problem persists. Apple you owe me a new computer, I have been an Apple user for over 30 years. This is 100% Apple’s doing, my computer was perfectly fine before, also runs slower now. Great update!

This is exactly the symptoms I have on my 2017 MAcBook Pro and iMac (late 2012), after doing an upgrade to Catalina two weeks. Very disappointing that Apple have not managed to fix this in 6 months. Incredibly poor engineering and QA. Sadly their products are significantly less robust than the used to be, even while the price continues to go north rapidly. Clearly they no longer take pride in technical excellence and a great customer experience. Maybe time to walk away from the Apple (locked-in) ecosystem.....