I have trawled everywhere trying to solve this as I think it's a usb issue rather than specifically Sparky. No success, so here I am.
I cannot remember when this started but here it is: I run Sparky 5 XFCE from a USB stick which seems to work perfectly well. However, if I click SHUTDOWN then boot up again it takes forever (literally minutes) stuck on "loading initial ramdisk ..." before finally loading up. But if I click RESTART it loads almost immediately. I seem to recall reading somewhere once that RESTART does not stop everything, so I am guessing something stays running that normally takes forever to fire up. The problem does not occur with Deepin, nor with Windows, that I have installed on the hard drive. I cannot find anything in any logs to explain it. Anyone any idea?
I looked up a little on systemd-analyze which when "blame" is added will detail time spent on boot up. I know, this is not your problem. My looking at "man systemd-analyze" yielded no good ideas.
What logs. "journalctl -b -1" and skip to the end and maybe look at the time stamps. Also try journalctl -b -1 | grep ailed These are not elegant solutions.
A couple years back I had similar problems, slow network shutdown, and usb's. I rememeber people were posting on BunsenLabs Forum and also on Siduction forum. Hopefully others will have better info.
peace out mark r
I have been experiencing exactly the same symptoms, from 60 to 90 secs to reboot.
My findings : If I disable bluetooth, the reboot is a breeze. If I turn off the connected mouse instead of turning off bluetooth it is a breeze but a little bit slower. Have tried all alternatives and options that could imagine, but would welcome fresh inputs.
You can type what you want, but unless you post the output of "systemd-analyze blame" . . . Good howto's on systemd and journalct are at DigitalOcean.
posting "inxi -brx" never hurts either for giving us information.
"exactly the same symptoms" however I doubt if you are starting from a usb stick every time as the o.p. is
One short possible solution haveged to remedy not having it "sudo apt install haveged" Search Sparky forum for "haveged".
PlanetDebian has had posts about it and answers, my search not so hot - wait I posted it here.
original https://daniel-lange.com/archives/152-Openssh-taking-minutes-to-become-available,-booting-takes-half-an-hour-...-because-your-server-waits-for-a-few-bytes-of-randomness.html
http://sparkylinux.org/forum/index.php/topic,4554.msg12109.html#msg12109
https://www.techrepublic.com/article/how-to-add-more-entropy-to-improve-cryptographic-randomness-on-linux/
and if you are using sddm
https://www.reddit.com/r/archlinux/comments/8gc4fg/for_anybody_having_issues_with_sddm_taking_a_long/
For checking the rng-tools try
"journalclt --boot=0 | grep ailed | less" #### --boot=0 your present login changing to 1 would show your prir login
| grep ailed shows all "failed" and "Failed"
| less the out put is paced to fit your terminal
As stated prior post output of "systemd-analyze blame" inxi gets you bonus points