[Wiltshire] Suspect hard drive infant mortality - SOLVED

[David Fletcher]

Sorry it was two months since I last posted on this....

I want to document here what I have eventually found out for the
benefit of anybody else who might be having shutdown troubles.

Briefly, I thought I might have had a bad hard drive after upgrading to
Mint 20 but I now believe the problems were caused by corruption of the
file system when the computer was not shutting down and switching off
properly. I could only get it to switch off by holding down the power
button something like every other time. Not good.

Then one day I was Google searching the shutdown problem and found out
about the file
/etc/systemd/system.conf.d/60_linuxmint.conf
which now has the line
DefaultTimeoutStopSec=10s
that in Mint 18 used to be
DefaultTimeoutStopSec=90s

Mint 18 shuts down and auto powers off properly, every single time.

The instructions at the top of the file
<quote>
# To override these values, create your own file in
# /etc/systemd/systemd.conf.d/60_custom.conf.
# Reload configuration with "sudo systemctl daemon-reload"
# Test with "systemctl show"
</quote>

DO NOT WORK! so I ended up editing the 50_linuxmint.conf file to set
the value to 50s and since I did that two months ago all computers, my
desktop, my laptop and the old desktop computer I set up at my
girlfriend's house, have been shutting down properly every single time
and causing me no problems at all. This however, as was pointed out by
Ralph.

What DOES appear to work is to do
cd /etc/systemd/system.conf.d/
sudo cp 50_linuxmint.conf 60_linuxmint.conf

and then edit the value in the 60_ file.

Somebody appears to have been careless with the instructions at the top
of the 50_ file.