IMac won't shutdown when external hard drive is hooked up.

Hello,
I have a 2011 iMac which i've loved using. I bought a Seagate goflex external harddrive so I could start using time machine. I've noticed that whenver I power my iMac down it will sit on the grey screen just before shutting off for a long time. In fact, it will not actually shut down until i unplug my external hard drive. As soon as I unplug my harddrive the mac starts thinking again and shuts down within seconds. Does anyone have any idea what the problem is? Why it would do this. I now hard plug my harddrive in because of this, which is kinda of dumb since I bought it to work as a time machine. Any help would be greatly appreciated. thank you

Safe Boot from the HD, (holding Shift key down at bootup), run Disk Utility in Applications>Utilities, then highlight your drive, click on Repair Permissions, see if it opens in Safe Mode, reboot when complete, test again.
Mac OS X: What is Safe Boot, Safe Mode...
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1564

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IMac won't shutdown when external hard drive is hooked up.

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