can't restart or shut down

How patient have you been? In other words, how long have you waited before pushing the button?

cheers,

Henry

Too short. Look closely -- is the little time-waster thingy spinning in the centre of the screen, about one-third up from the bottom? Go and get a cup of coffee; let it sit for 15 or 20 minutes. If it still hasn't restarted, then you may have a problem. In my experience, this delay has only happened once, each time a system update/upgrade is done. By forcing a restart with the power button, you are presumably interrupting it from what it wants to do, thus making it try again and again.

By the way -- have you repaired permissions?

cheers,

Henry

heron stone wrote:

now what?

???

You've never said what kind of Mac this is. Have you tried booting from your Tiger DVD, or a previous-system DVD (or CD-ROM)? Can you shut down then?

Also -- a longshot -- you might try going into System Preferences and re-selecting the Startup disk.

cheers,

Henry

I followed up on...

.. Delete the folder 'Quickbackstartup' (part of 'speedtools')in the

and it seems to have done the trick.

Cheers and thanks to everyone who contributed.

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How about taking a look at system.log to see what is going on?

Did you open Activity Monitor to see what apps are running that won't quit?

What about "Force Quit", does it say any apps are crashed? Cmd-opt-escape brings up the Forcequit box.

What happens if you type "sudo reboot" into Terminal?

-- Gnarlie

I had this exact same problem recently.

Have you done an Open Firmware reset? That's step one. Boot into Open Firmware and do the usual reset-nvram reset-all enchantment.

If that doesn't work, you may have to clean-install the system. That's what I ended up doing and it did solve the problem. m.

I've had shutdown & restart problems before, but only when my iPod was plugged into its dock. As soon as the iPod was unplugged, everything was fine.

Andre

On 2005-07-12 00:46:07 -0400, heron stone said:

i just upgraded from 10.3.9 to 10.4.1.

surprisingly, everything is working well now.
all my critical apps are running with no problems.

there were a few minor problems for a day or two,
but everything is resolved now... except this...

i cannot restart or shut down from the apple menu.

it looks like it's going to do it, but when it gets
down to just my desktop picture with no menubar or doc or icons, it just hangs there.

i have to use the power button on the box to get it
going again.

it's not a big problem, because i usually leave my system running. but it still bothers me and has me wondering what's going on.

does anyone have any ideas about this?

heron

unDO email address
___
Nature, heron stone to be commanded, http://www.gendo.net must be obeyed. mailto:heronDO@gendo.net

I have had this happen and had the reset nvram fix the problem. But something made it return. My ASL log sometimes shows that the system crashes on shutdown when launchd tries to restart syslogd after having shut everything down. Other times no kernel panic log or any record is recorded.

The nvram reset fixes the problem, in that after I use the method, login, restart (multiple times), I get clean restarts. But at some point on a system running for long periods, there appears to be a process that starts and will not shut down properly. I read that 10.4 finally implemented the system starter stop process, and I suspected privoxy on my system because its system starter is not a correctly written file. I have rewritten it to support "stop" and "restart" and will see if after a time I still get failures.

Restart while holding command-option-O-F and follow these instructions:

<http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=42642>

m.

Yes, there is an application that will shut down your Mac. I tried it a few weeks ago from Version Tracker. It is called

Super Shut Down - 2.0b ttp://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/21250

Try it!

aRKay

heron stone wrote:

the problem was solved by removing the old SpeedTools startup stuff

Indeed, this may have caused the problem in my case as well. I never did figure it out and ended up doing a clean install of the system. m.