18.04 loosing the journal

I'm running 18.04 on a AMD 64 Athlon and have been "loosing the journal" intermittantly since installation . (I power off frequently) I recently made a script that does sync, sync, sync, sync, sync, wait -1, shutdown now, and no longer loose journal. I guess there's a bug in the shutdown command shipped with this release? .....machine is a COMPAQ PRESARIO SR1750NX

the jornal of what
the main History
the mdi
the VAR corrdinates
the last workpice zero point

I have no idea of what journal is lost: during a subsequent power on, the system spews out a large number of what look look like a register dump and halts without booting. Upon additional power off reboots it goes into a lengthy period of time after it prints the message "recovering journal" (hence my suspicion that it has lost whatever a journal is). The system usually "finds" it's journal and operates normally until some random event creates a need to repeat a recovery. I just use the system for emails and surfing, I am not running (near as I can tell) any application except the shutdown script on the machine when I power off, I have made my shutdown script into a screen icon and run it by mouse clicking it. I changed the script by eliminating the -1 parameter to the wait command and did observe a "loss of journal" upon subsequent reboot.

The on/off button for this computer consists of a circled icon on the upper right hand side of the screen which came about there when I loaded the ISO image back in May of 2019. When I press that button, I intermittently get the lost journal problem. When I use my script I do not get the lost journal problem, everything works fine. sorry I didn't make that clear enough.

The more I look at my test script the less likely I think that it is doing anything truly amazing, and the more likely I feel that there is a significant problem in the shutdown process on the 18.04 release. My script continues to "work" better than the shutdown icon supplied in the release despite changes that should break it. The shutdown icon engages a 60 sec countdown timer but I have no clue what its doing in those 60 sec. My old presario does have a power off function and the power could be going off to quickly for the old optical drive in the computer to finish "journalling" when the icon is used ......