[gutsy] Failed to initialize HAL

[LCID Fire]

Binary package hint: hal

After upgrading to gutsy today I receive this message.

[LCID Fire (lcid-fire)]

As a notice - starting the hald when booting takes about 5 Minutes (without any error message) - there seems something wrong big time...

[earthforce_1 (earthforce1)]

I am also seeing this message with one of the machines I upgraded today: (Sep 30/07)

P3/800 with 512M of RAM, and a Linksys wireless 802.11b USB network card

The update seemed to go well until I rebooted and as soon as the Ubuntu splash screen status indicator went all the way to the right, the screen went totally black and the machine appeared to hang. Hitting <CTL><ALT><BS> repeatedly did not recover a command line prompt.

I booted into the recovery mode kernel and verified the networking was working despite some ominous looking errors:

Configuring network interfaces
at76c503.c:2522 assertion dev->istate == INIT failed
at76c503.c:1784 assertion dev->curr_bs1 == NULL failed

Aside from that, I could ping sites ok, so I assume the network was ok. The real problem when I attempted an aptitude update/upgrade/dist-upgrade from the root command prompt. Trouble started with:
* Reloading system message bus config...
Failed to open connection to system message bus: Failed to connect to socket /var/run/dbus/system_bus_socket: No such file or directory
invoke_rc.d: Initscript dbus, action "force-reload" failed
* Starting Hardware abstraction layer hald
invoke-rc.d initscript hal, action "start" failed.
dpkg: error processing hal (--configure).
Supprocess post-installation script returned error status 2.
dpkg: dependency problems prevent configuration of hal-device-manager: hal-device manager depends on hal; However Package hal is not configured yet.
dpkg: eror processing hal-device-manager (--configure): dependency problem - leaving unconfigured.

The failed hald initialization hangs the system for about 5 minutes. Please let me know whatever tests you want me to run on the affected system to help resolve this.

[LCID Fire (lcid-fire)]

At least for me the hanging is now gone - but initializing still fails

[fuk_comcast_77 (xboxmods3077)]

I have pretty much the same problem. I upgraded from feisty to gutsy and after I rebooted, it gave me that popup "Failed to initialize HAL". My system does not freeze. It finishes loading. I just have no network and I cannot mount my usb keydrives or cd/dvdrom. The wierd part is that if I go to synaptic and re install HAL, Log off and log back in, Everything is fine. Reboot and the same thing happens again. For some reason HAL does not start at boot, But it starts upon re-install?

[TenLeftFingers (tenleftfingers)]

The following worked for me. I was getting the message when the desktop loaded and it only happened when I switched to autologin. I didn't have any other symptoms except the actual error dialog but the following fixed it. Heres a quote from a post on the forums located here -> http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?p=3545464

BEGIN QUOTE
okay after reading the above mentioned bug report it would appear that Dbus needs to start before Hal and GDM last. so the oder would be

Dbus-->Hal-->GDM

With a fresh install of Gutsy I looked in the "/etc/rc2.d/" folder and found
S12Dbus
S12hal
S30GDM

So I renamed S12hal with

'sudo mv /etc/rc2.d/S12hal /etc/rc2.d/S13hal'

Then I did a

Sudo Reboot

Also I have an Nvidia 8800GTX card so at the grub menu I hit Escape and edited the startup line at the end where it said "splash" to "nosplash".

Now everything is fine!
END QUOTE