MP 7,1 Shutdown Issues

[bob_stan]

I am having problems getting it to shut down correctly. It either sits forever at the Catalina background screen with nothing else visible, or shuts down and reboots. When logging back in, I get the message it has shut down because of an issue, but the log entries are not helpful. I have 3 external Thunderbay4 enclosures attached (2 Thunderbolt3 and 1 Thunderbolt2) and am running SoftRaid on the drives in those enclosures. Anyone else having these issues?

 

[bxs]

I am having problems getting it to shut down correctly. It either sits forever at the Catalina background screen with nothing else visible, or shuts down and reboots. When logging back in, I get the message it has shut down because of an issue, but the log entries are not helpful. I have 3 external Thunderbay4 enclosures attached (2 Thunderbolt3 and 1 Thunderbolt2) and am running SoftRaid on the drives in those enclosures. Anyone else having these issues?

This is a common problem (PITA) with the Shutdown followed by a mysterious reboot that brings you back to the login screen. Very annoying. It's not related to the MP7,1 either. I see this periodically on my late 2016 15" rMBP13,3 which also has Thunderbolt 1 & 2 units attached, but not using SoftRAID. They are Promise Pegasus R4 and R6 units and OWC's Thunderbolt 4 mini units. I firmly believe the issue is related to daisy chaining Thunderbolt devices as if I disconnect all Thunderbolt devices the shutdown will always complete without having the mysterious reboot occur.

If you shutdown when the mysterious reboot happens that bring you to the login screen simply select shutdown again and it should/will then shutdown successfully.

 

[bob_stan]

Yes it does. I think I will remove one device from the Thunderbolt daisy chain and connect it directly and see if that helps.

 

[bob_stan]

After bxs's comment about the shutdown issue possibly being related to chaining Thunderbolt devices, I made a change to my setup. I had two Thunderbolt3 enclosures and one Thunderbolt2 enclosure all daisy chained together with the Thunderbolt2 as the final unit. I disconnected the Thunderbolt2 unit from the daisy chain and connected it to its own port. While this has only been set this way for several shutdowns, I have had no problems. Before, every shutdown would hang. Fingers crossed.