El Capitan will not restart or shut down.

I might have found the source for my problems regarding my MacBook Pro's lacking will to shut down. I took a look at the installed software on my Mac. I remembered one of the lessons from my time with PC-ownership. Try to uninstall the antivirus software. I had AVIRA installed, I uninstalled it, and so far the Macbook Pro has shut down and booted faster than ever. If you have AVIRA or any other protective software installed try uninstalling it via the uninstall-package or switching it off.

I've tried several SMC and PRAM/NVRAM resets to no avail.

Don't have any antivirus software installed or interfering.

Interestingly, I use TinkerTool to reset things back to default to see if that helped anything. It has an option to relaunch Finder from within the program. Tried that, and it hung. Desktop icons gone, couldn't launch a new Finder window, right-clicking on the icon on the dock said it wasn't responding. This furthers my suspicions that the problem is here somewhere.

Update: TinkerTool closes Finder and can't relaunch it, however I can shutdown from the Apple menu after doing so.

Quitting Finder from Activity Monitor also allows normal shutdown from the Apple menu.

I have the same issue on my MBP 2012 Retina.

Can't shut down nor restart (unless manually) -- ALSO, certain USB devices don't work. My superdrive and USB Blue Yeti mic don't work, however external drives DO work, strangely.

I've done 4 re-installs. Reset P Ram, SMC, etc.

Talked to 3 agents by phone on Apple Support. Taken it to Apple store for a complete reformat and reinstall.

The same problems remain. Everyone is stumped.

Based on this thread, this seems to be a known bug.

Except I have the extra headache of USB malfunctions.

So very, very, very frustrating. Any other ideas?

My thread: El Capitan Bugs: USB Ports Not working + Shut down / Restart Problems

I think I might just try a reinstall, as I'm also having an unrelated problem with waking from hibernation... This install has had a long life. Started on a 2010 MBP with Snow Leopard, upgraded to Mountain Lion, got moved to an SSD, the SSD moved to a 2012 MBP, and then upgraded to El Capitan. The wake from hibernation issue started after moving the drive from the 2010 to 2012. I knew it was a risk to just move the drive into another computer rather than reinstall, but that seemed to be the only issue, which I didn't even realize was a problem for a while. This reboot/shutdown/logout issue only came up in El Capitan. The 2010 has since gotten a clean install of Yosemite, set up to use, and then almost immediately an upgrade to El Capitan. It's running fine.

I'm having a similar issue. Everything appears to shutdown or sleep correctly - screen goes black and lights are off, however it only wakes after a hard shutdown holding the power button and hitting it again. I can tell it's not fully shutdown because I've been unplugging the power at night and when I do my hard reset in the morning 30% of the power has been drained.

I've tried resetting SMC / PRAM, force quitting finder. All started since updating to El Capitan. Macbook Retina mid-2012. Help?

It took a drive reformat and reinstalling all my apps from scratch to fix my issues.

Re: El Capitan Bugs: USB Ports Not working + Shut down / Restart Problems

I tried to reinstall the OS without reformatting from Recovery... no luck. So I reformatted and did a clean install, and then migrated only my User account and Other files and documents from my Time Capsule. After 15+ hours to move 600GB, this was successful! Both my restart and hibernation problems were solved. Then I migrated my Applications (another 5+ hours), and the restart problem returned. I tried another migration of just my User account again, to see if it wiped the previous Applications migration, but it didn't. Another 15+ hours wasted. I tried deleting all the Applications, but no luck. So now I've reformatted again, starting another reinstall, and will only migrate my User account and data, and reinstall all applications. Will report back after another day of waiting...

Hi,

I have very much the same problem. I tried also the creation of a new account and use it to shut the machine down successfully. When rebooting into my old account, I was able to successfully shut the system down using my old account for a while, but now the problem seems to be back as before :-(

Do you use some kind of a Managed Environment i.e. running a MDM system?

I just installed El Capitan & it is doing the same thing on my home computer (iMAC). Oddly, on my work computer (MACbook Pro) it shutdown just fine.. Strange. Apple, please help.

I used the maintenance software ONYX to delete Boot-Caches and repair user permissions. That seems to help ...

I had the same issue where if I tried to reboot it would hide everything but the Dock and just freeze. I followed the instructions by GSfromNL in the following post https://discussions.apple.com/thread/7253865?answerId=29038473022#29038473022

The post I am referring to has the following instructions:

...

From OWC and edited by me:

1) Open Terminal in /Applications/Utilities

2) Enter "system_profiler SPExtensionsDataType > ~/Desktop/kextList.txt" without the quotes and hit return (this will take a short while to run).

....

This did not appear to work for me at first. I moved all the "Not Signed" kext files to the unsupported directory as suggested, rebooted from terminal, and then tried to reboot from menu and it still froze. So I moved the kext files back and did a reboot from terminal. When I did that reboot I got a pop-up message for each of the kext files I moved back (5 for me) saying they were not installed properly and would have to be reinstalled. After that it rebooted. And now I can reboot from my Apple->Restart menu again. The one thing I noticed still is that it seems to take longer on the black screen before you hear the distinctive reboot sound. But it is rebooting. 5 times in a row before posting this.

Same problems here on iMac27 (late 2012), MacMini 2013, MacBookPro 2014.

iMac and MBP got a clean install.

The only Apps i'm using are OneDrive and PopClip. That's it.

Shutdown hangs and hangs and ..... Power off forced. On all 3 machines. Now I will test a macBook Air 2014 and i'm expecting the same problems.

Killing Finder before shutdown sometimes helps.

Never had problems like this with Yosemite.

I have the same problem. Choose shutdown, restart or logout in finder, this action crashes the app but not turn off, restart the HW.

I tryed to delete the file com.apple.SoftwareUpdate.plist (in \Library\Preferences) and move to table the file com.apple.SoftwareUpdate.plist.lockfile (in the same directory) and the shutdown command works fine but the restart and finaly session not work.

Too is not possible to restart the Finder.

The Apple Inc. have much answers to response about the latest OS versions.

My mac:

OS X EL Captain 10.11

Macbook Pro (13-inch, 2012)

2,5 Ghz Intel Core i5 Processor

16GB 1333 MHz DDR3

Intel HD Graphics 4000 1536 MB

Same issue here, MBP mid 2012.

Never had this issue before El Capitan. Tried the NVRAM and SMC reset as per instruction from apple support, no joy.