Mac Pro 3,1 trouble installing El Capitan 10.11.4

[g.man]

Hi there,

I'm having trouble installing the latest El Capitan release, 10.11.4. It has downloaded but when I press the "restart" button my machine just freezes/hangs on the desktop screen with Finder invisible. Anyone else have this problem or idea how to fix it?

I have a 2008 Mac Pro 3.1
16G RAM
Boot drive on SSD on Velocity Solo 2x
Currently running El Capitan OS 10.11.3

(Had same problem trying to update from a SATA disc that has my boot drive cloned on it)

Thanks!
Gunnar

 

[g.man]

Ok, so the problem seems to lie with the fact that my computer just won't shut down at all. Ran disk first aid and everything is fine. Has anyone experienced this before?

 

[g.man]

Ok, so I've been reading on the apple support communities that this is an issue with people upgrading to El Capitan. The problem seems to be twofold: 1. USB ports stop working 2. Machines don't power down/up normally. People have been told at the apple genius bar to back up their data, do a complete wipe/clean install and manually re-install programs one by one. Less than ideal.

I have noticed that a this happens a lot to people that are running audio programs on their systems and some people have been able to solve the problem by removing .kext and/or preferences files from Avid and Native Instruments, which seem to be in conflict with El Capitan. I do run a lot of audio programs myself so I might have to do a lot of rummaging in /Library/// territory before I find the culprit.

I did a clone of my boot drive before I installed El Capitan, so I just reverted back to that clone (10.8.5, which is rock solid) and am going to stay there and only upgrade when this issue is sorted out by Apple.

Anyone else that has this problem and has any updates please post here and I will do so as well if I find a solution.