Unable to initialize HAL error

My AAO froze this morning while using FireFox 3. Nothing worked, so I held down the power key until it rebooted. It went through the boot cycle twice. During the second boot, an error message displayed: "Internal error: Unable to initialize HAL."

I've googled the error, and know what it means, but I don't know what caused it. After a couple more reboots, the error has gone away, and USB flash drive auto-mounts. The last logged change I made on this machine was to install man pages and openssh-clients using yum. To the best of my recollection, I had rebooted at least once after these installings, without seeing this error message. I have a full backup of the machine to its state prior to these installs.

Questions:

1. What causes this error? (I know, there may not be a single answer.)
2. Since the problem went away, should I ignore it, or should I restore?

 

I get the same HAL error but by the time I can check what is running, there's three hal* processes running. I can make it go away by restoring the default group-app.xml file (weird...). In my case the HAL error is followed by NetworkManager not starting - presumably because it depends on the hal* processes that haven't started.

I believe that the cause of the HAL error is that the pre-requisite services (of which dbus is one) are not running before the hald start up script is run. You might be able to make the error go away by inserting a "sleep 1" (literally making the script pause a second) on a new line at the top of the start section of the hald start up script.

Out of interest have you done the SSD speedup tweak to grub.conf? I have and it's after that (and other program related tweaks) that I had the problems.

 

I remember something about whenever I used Linpus and opened a folder or application before the internet connection was established after start-up that I would get the hal error message(s). My solution then was simply to reboot and always keep my hands off the netbook until internet connection was reached. After that the hal error messages never appeared again.

 

hi guys i do have same problem,
in my system i can't work any thing whenever i restart the machine it load every thing and then it froze it doesnt allow me to close it or let me do ant thing
so please if any one can help me
thanks

 

Wow

Check the file /etc/rc.local ("ALT-F2 terminal", then "sudo mousepad /etc/rc.local")

There should be a line "setpci -d 197b:2381 AE=47". If there is a "sleep 10" line above it, you should be ok. Otherwise, add the "sleep 10" ABOVE set setpci.

Give it a whirl...