After over a decade of ignoring this machine because of poor performance I've finally come to the point of making a few changes.

The E2200 processor has been swapped out for a E5800, a Quadro K2000 has been installed as well as 4 one GB DDR2 RAM cards installed.

Near E-waste at the time of purchase with Vista installed this was one of the major turning points for me in becoming a Linux user and as of now this machine has completely turned around to being a functional machine that I have never seen operate so smooth and seamlessly.

Sure it's never going to content with Blender rendering or even some simpler multi-core tasks but a fine administrative office mule she's become!

One hitch, she hangs on shutdown with either a grey screen with text of most recent and previously a black screen. I've tried multiple syntax prompts and nothing completely turns this machine off other than a hard stop power button press for 10 seconds or so.

I'm hoping for a little clarification and opinions of this thread that I've found that seems apropos to me anyway. The two lines of context mentioned should just be deleted? I'm probably being over hesitant as I'd hate to see a reversal in the progress made with this machine. link below and thank you

https://forum.mxlinux.org/viewtopic.php?t=50307

It's what I consider fairly well set up with a mounted drive for Timeshift as well as 10.6 GB partitioned swap space.

$ df -h
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
udev 1.9G 0 1.9G 0% /dev
tmpfs 392M 1.2M 391M 1% /run
/dev/sdb1 906G 12G 849G 2% /
tmpfs 5.0M 16K 5.0M 1% /run/lock
tmpfs 783M 40M 743M 6% /dev/shm
cgroup 12K 0 12K 0% /sys/fs/cgroup
tmpfs 392M 4.0K 392M 1% /run/user/108
tmpfs 392M 12K 392M 1% /run/user/1000

$ lsblk -l
NAME MAJ:MIN RM SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINTS
sda 8:0 0 465.8G 0 disk
sda1 8:1 0 465.8G 0 part
sdb 8:16 0 931.5G 0 disk
sdb1 8:17 0 920.9G 0 part /
sdb2 8:18 0 10.6G 0 part
sdc 8:32 1 0B 0 disk
sdd 8:48 1 0B 0 disk
sde 8:64 1 0B 0 disk
sdf 8:80 1 0B 0 disk
sr0 11:0 1 1024M 0 rom

The extra drives shown are from a failed drive complete crash in an LVM configuration, there's only the sda and sdb with the later being the Timeshift storage drive.

What exactly does this mean?
/etc/modprobe.d/hang-on-shutdown.conf linesare comments. Deleting them would do nothing. It may be the idea there was to try uncommenting those lines.

Have you run memtest86 or memtest86+ for several hours? RAM can go bad in its old age. Normally I would suggest making sure the BIOS version is the latest available, but you have an HP for which support was eradicated from its website. Did it have the problem before swapping the E2200 for the E5800?

I have a PC that doesn't differ a whole lot from yours, both with Wolfdale CPUs, still competent enough IMO:Mine, instead of not shutting down, doesn't find any HDD to boot from on power up. After the no boot device message, I must CAD to trigger a boot from HDD.

Thanks for chiming in!
Command line prompts in a terminal are the same as syntax prompts if I'm correct.

This machine does reboot both from terminal prompt if I sign in as su to initialize the prompt and GUI with no problems. I forgot to mention the SSD the system is booting from now is a recent addition, which has brought boot time down to 50ish seconds.

This I still do not understand, maybe versed in a different context would help but for some reason it just doesn't fit in my head.
I have no Windohs OSs in anything to use for a BIOS update and have never updated BIOS before.

No I haven't although the previous configuration, dual drive booted MX Linux 19.1 XFCE originally and Mint non-LDME (19ish I think, it didn't get much use) didn't have this same shutdown issue. I'll give it a run anyway and see, thanks for the thought!

Your machine sounds to be at least a year newer than this a6400f, motherboard anyway, I'd check the boot order in the BIOS although you've likely been there already.

Thank you for the response!

Yes