El Capitan will not restart or shut down.

This problem actually began a few months ago with Maverick. I figured it would work out when I did a clean install of El Capitan — but no! I have to admit that after the clean install I brought everything back from my TimeMachine backup. I now have the terminal reboot and shutdown commands saved in Notes so I can easily cut and paste. I've since tried just about every idea found online and nothing has worked. Next I figure I will try another clean install and only drag and drop what I need & totally reinstall applications. Not looking forward to it. I'd feel better if I knew it would solve the problem.

Yeah... the ONLY thing that worked for me was a total reinstall with drag and drop file recovery. Annoying, but it did work.

Good luck!

After I wrote my post earlier today I did a bit more research, which lead me to opening the Console — I noticed a lot of crashes reported & also the name of an app I had installed — CleanMyDrive. I love the little app, it docks on the menu bar, shows all the drives attached and home much space is used/free. It is one of those apps that runs in the background and does not appear when listing all running apps. I quit it and, surprised, my Mac shutdown. Upon further research I saw that the app had not been updated since Yosemite. Something in a later update of Maverick must have caused the problem which persisted into El Capitan. While I am sure this little app is not causing the problem for others, I do suggest rooting around to see if some background app might be refusing to quit and thus creating the shutdown problem.

also copied the terminal reboot commands, as they seem to still work. Thanks for the tip.

Solution: Format drive; clean install of El Capitan; migrate User Account and other files but NOT Applications; reinstall Applications.

The problem must be in some software in the Applications folder, or other system file that gets copied over when migrating the Applications folder. When I migrated them, the problem returned. Doing a migration without left me with a working machine. This solution was easier and less time consuming than trying to track down the exact piece of software causing a problem.

I still have a copy of the non-working install on an external... if I have time I may try to work out exactly what the problem was, but in the meantime, after dedicating a weekend to the debug-reinstall-migration process, I have a working machine.

Same Shutdown and Restart Issues with a MacBook Air and El Capitan. An easy work around is to Log Out first and then do the Restart from the Login screen.

Was in a call with Apple Support yesterday.

The engineer took plenty of time time to investigate, in my case it turned out to be a specific application (Teamviewer).

As soon as we removed this application the reboot/restart process worked normally again, even after reinstalling a fresh version of this application.

This will not help everyone, but maybe some using the same software?

Hi, small update.

if i unmount all network-drives (2 SMB + 1 AFP TimeCapsule) before restart and unmount local USB-Drives (1) and also make "killAll Finder" the system stops normal at shutdown.

2nd test:

- If I work for a short time (1-2 hours) shutdown works with mounted devices.

- if I work long (8-12 hours) I must unmount all network and local USB-Devices.

When I open a network drive before unmount/shutdown, Finder sometimes shows me all folders of this drive, but they are all white and I can't open them.

At this state shutdown hangs.

BUT: When I click shutdown I can hear that my TimeCapsule-Drive is spinning up. At this moment the white wheel on the screen spins and spins and .....

crazy. I hope that apple will read this posts too.

Michael

I'm using teamViewer too. I will check that. THX

I have three Macs and only had a problem with the 10.11.1 on my late 2013 MBP15 retina. I tried most of the things described here. Finally, I tried closing all applications until the "force quit" window showed nothing but Finder. Then I logged off and clicked restart on the log in screen as suggested by JuanVillate. That worked. The update installed.

Thanks for the suggestion!

The same for me on iMac (2014) like michael0662 wrote!!! This is definitly the bug of El Capitan.

With the same total configuration and clean install Yosenite works fine but El Capitan has the problem with shut down!!!

Shutdown also does not work anymore, I have to press the power button for 4 seconds to shutdown. After rebooting again the OS knows about the improper shutdown and asks to open the last opened applications.

The problem appeared after the upgrade to 10.11. The update the 10.11.1 did not solve this problem.

I Had the same problem. It turned out to be a program running in the top bar.

What I did was shut down, launch prefs but do not select anything.

Then I went to the top bar and started shutting down programs.

When I had shut the troubling programs, my computer shut down!

The troubling programme for me was air display. I have since deleted it and all ok now.

Hope this is of some help. J.

I had this same problem Was getting hung up before shutting down on the cleared desktop image (which happens to be a grey screen for me).

I talked to Apple support who could not figure it out, and recommended that I go to the genius bar, which would have been really time consuming. I figured it out by turning off any apps I could that were running in the top bar, and narrowing it down to one offending app - an app used for beaming my screen to iPads and monitors called "air display host" had something to do with it. Avatron the makers of Air Display host should have published that they were causing a bug in El Capitan.

Apple should not push this upgrade at us so frequently if it causes conflicts with so many common popular apps likes the ones mentioned in the forum which are sold in the app store. Doesn't apple have a way of checking with their app developers to confirm that their software works with the beta version of the OS and is not about to crash it completely? If apple has some oversight on the products then they need to own up to that and somehow communicate that some apps will not migrate over, and will actually mess up the whole system. How is there a total gap in communication between Apple, developers, and the custome? When apple is claiming oversight over the contents of the app store, how are there apps that migrate over and then totally mess up the OS, without any customers even being notified, and without any way for Apple support to diagnose the problem? Isn't that the whole point of such a self contained store with apps that have all gotten a stamp of approval? I could understand if this was an app purchased outside the app store causing the problem, but there's clearly a gap here that needs to be addressed.

I'm just taking the computer back to Yosemite using a time machine backup. Good thing I had a weekend, this process is very time consuming. This is the first time that I've not been able to update to a new Mac OS just because the migration is so glitchy. Even without this hangup, I was also getting a 25 seconds mysterious black screen directly after login. I'm not sure if thats part of the new startup sequence, but it's really disconcerting to see a long black screen immediately after I login. I love apple, and thank goodness for time machine, but sorry El Capitan, this is too bumpy of a start.

I have this same problem on a MacMini. I have identified the issue causing this for me. When I have an external drive connected via Thunderbolt 2 port it stalls on restart or shutdown and I have to do a force shutdown. I usually have a Drobo connected but I tested this with a Lacie drive as well resulting in the same issue. Simply, ejecting the disc does not help. I have to eject the disc and then physically unplug the cable and then I can restart or shut down normally.

Does anyone have an idea on what's going on here? Or a way to find out?