How to shut down safely from internet recovery mode

[Sowamasta]

I have a Seagate external hard drive plugged into my Mac book Pro (mid 2012). The machine booted into internet recovery mode instead of the macosx utilities screen.
Now I need to switch off and start again, but I am worried about not shutting down the external drive properly. It is the only disk I have with a backup of my system, after I erased Macintosh HD so that I could reinstall El Capitan after an installation of High Sierra made my machine barely useable.

Do I have to just switch off the MBP at the power button and accept the risk?
If the external drive was damaged, how would I know and could I recover the contents?

Thanks in advance.

 

[velocityg4]

The shutdown command is there to keep you from turning off the computer with unsaved documents or while some process is in the middle of writing/modifying data. As it is in Internet Recovery. Unless you actively started something (Terminal command, installation, Disk Utility, &c). There should be no data being written/modified. So, it should be safe to turn off.

 

[Sowamasta]

Phew, I hope so. Well, I'll try tommorow and hopefully all will be well. Thanks so much for your input.

 

[MacUser2525]

I erased Macintosh HD so that I could reinstall El Capitan after an installation of High Sierra made my machine barely useable.

Do I have to just switch off the MBP at the power button and accept the risk?
If the external drive was damaged, how would I know and could I recover the contents?

Thanks in advance.

You should be good as has been mentioned. Why I reply is this not just for a me too post. The High Sierra making it not useable was it freezing all the time on you. And was it fully patched and up to date. I had a weird one just before Christmas when I installed the last security update for it. After that I never had a single day without needing to force a reboot holding the power button. Not that it really matters I am liking the Mojave it forced me to upgrade to, again a rock solid never crashes machine, Apple sure has gone down hill with the quality control. I had seen many mentions of it before here but never really paid attention until it bit me on the behind..

 

[Weaselboy]

Now I need to switch off and start again, but I am worried about not shutting down the external drive properly.

From recovery you should be able to launch Disk Utility then right click the external drive and eject it.

 

[Soba]

From recovery you should be able to launch Disk Utility then right click the external drive and eject it.

Yup. Also @Sowamasta, I might be missing something, but is there a reason you cannot open the Apple menu and choose "Shut Down" or "Restart"? This is the best way to exit recovery mode; it will safely unmount all drives and reboot your system normally, just as when shutting down or restarting from within macOS.