Comment 2 for bug 146741

I'm having the same problem. In my case it's Gutsy/i386 not a dist-upgrade but a simple upgrade from a previous verson of HAL.

Me thinks the Importance needs to go from "undecided" to "critical". Anytime yesterday would be fine. ;)

I can't access peripherals (notably an external hard drive) and other packages are depending on HAL and therefore won't install.

scott@scottbox:~$ sudo apt-get upgrade
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
The following packages have been kept back:
  ekiga
0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 1 not upgraded.
4 not fully installed or removed.
Need to get 0B of archives.
After unpacking 0B of additional disk space will be used.
Do you want to continue [Y/n]? y
Setting up hal (0.5.9.1-1ubuntu9) ...
 * Reloading system message bus config... [ OK ]
 * Starting Hardware abstraction layer hald invoke-rc.d: initscript hal, action "start" failed.
dpkg: error processing hal (--configure):
 subprocess post-installation script returned error exit status 1
dpkg: dependency problems prevent configuration of gnome-power-manager:
 gnome-power-manager depends on hal; however:
  Package hal is not configured yet.
dpkg: error processing gnome-power-manager (--configure):
 dependency problems - leaving unconfigured
dpkg: dependency problems prevent configuration of hal-device-manager:
 hal-device-manager depends on hal; however:
  Package hal is not configured yet.
dpkg: error processing hal-device-manager (--configure):
 dependency problems - leaving unconfigured
dpkg: dependency problems prevent configuration of kde-guidance-powermanager:
 kde-guidance-powermanager depends on hal; however:
  Package hal is not configured yet.
dpkg: error processing kde-guidance-powermanager (--configure):
 dependency problems - leaving unconfigured
Errors were encountered while processing:
 hal
 gnome-power-manager
 hal-device-manager
 kde-guidance-powermanager
Saving new apt-history status...
E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1)