Sorry to bug y'all, but I'm at my wit's end here.
Last week, I tried to load QTparted in order to reformat a thumb drive. It would not load and when I checked the wiki, it seems as if there are a couple of known bugs with it.
Then, I tried to access the thumb drive and it wasn't recognized. The error message said HAL not loaded. The same thing was also happening to the CD/DVD drive. My system wouldn't recognize anything I put in it.
I closed all applications and restarted my system and HAL still won't load.
I tried searching on the various forums for this behavior and couldn't find anything resolved.
After three physical restarts, hitting Esc and doing a dkpg repair (which it said it didn't need) it loaded once more and was working fine. I still haven;t the slightest idea what happened.
Three days ago, I was working as usual, with the following windows open:
Firefox (several tabs)
Kopete
Kontact
TrueCrypt (thumb drive volume)
Ktorrent (several downloads)
While I was switching from one Firefox tab to another, the system locked up. At first, the cursor disappeared, then it jumped back on screen in different locations, several times.
I waited, and in about a minute, it stabilized. From then on, for the next half hour, the mouse cursor worked, but nothing else would respond. The keyboard was also non-responsive. I tried hitting all of the F keys with ten seconds between each and nothing happened. I gave it a half hour to see if it would clear and finally gave up and powered down.
Everything seemed to work fine when it came back up, including thumb drives, TrueCrypt and CD/DVD. As usual, I left it on overnight.
The next morning, I sat down to write a bit more and the thumb drive wouldn't load. When I checked, it said it needed HAL. Same thing I ran into the other day. This time, I closed all active programs and did a full, power-off shutdown. When it came back, everything, including HAL/thumbdrives was working.
This was really making me a bit nervous. I'm starting to think there's a hardware (heat related?) problem.
Everything has been working fine for the past two days. I had been using my thumbdrives regularly.
Last night, I dismounted the thumbdrive properly from TrueCrypt and then did a 'safe remove'. All was fine.
When I went to check free space with Konqeror. I saw that HAL wasn't loaded again.
I did a full, power-off shutdown, brought it back up in Recovery mode and ran the repair utilities. The said everything was fine. Once again, everything came up fine, but no HAL.
Then, I did a hard (power off) boot and it came up with "kstartupconfig won't
load'.
I did another restart and went into recovery mode. Tried repair dkpg and it failed to read the servers.
If I go into ksysguard, it shows hal as loaded, but it is always sleeping.
I restarted again and this time it loaded, so I went to console and tried an apt-get update and this is the result.
=========
Ign cdrom://Kubuntu 8.04.1 _Hardy Heron_ - Release i386 (20080701.2) hardy
Relea
se.gpg
Ign cdrom://Kubuntu 8.04.1 _Hardy Heron_ - Release i386 (20080701.2)
hardy/main
Translation-en_US
Ign cdrom://Kubuntu 8.04.1 _Hardy Heron_ - Release i386 (20080701.2)
hardy/restr
icted Translation-en_US
Ign cdrom://Kubuntu 8.04.1 _Hardy Heron_ - Release i386 (20080701.2) hardy
Relea
se
Ign cdrom://Kubuntu 8.04.1 _Hardy Heron_ - Release i386 (20080701.2)
hardy/main
Packages
Ign cdrom://Kubuntu 8.04.1 _Hardy Heron_ - Release i386 (20080701.2)
hardy/restr
icted Packages
Err cdrom://Kubuntu 8.04.1 _Hardy Heron_ - Release i386 (20080701.2)
hardy/main
Packages
Please use apt-cdrom to make this CD-ROM recognized by APT. apt-get update
can
not be used to add new CD-ROMs
Err cdrom://Kubuntu 8.04.1 _Hardy Heron_ - Release i386 (20080701.2)
hardy/restr
icted Packages
Please use apt-cdrom to make this CD-ROM recognized by APT. apt-get update
can
not be used to add new CD-ROMs
Hit http://us.archive.ubuntu.com hardy Release.gpg
Ign http://us.archive.ubuntu.com hardy/main Translation-en_US
Hit http://archive.canonical.com hardy Release.gpg
Ign http://archive.canonical.com hardy/partner Translation-en_US
Hit http://security.ubuntu.com hardy-security Release.gpg
Ign http://security.ubuntu.com hardy-security/main Translation-en_US
Ign http://security.ubuntu.com hardy-security/restricted Translation-en_US
Ign http://us.archive.ubuntu.com hardy/restricted Translation-en_US
Ign http://us.archive.ubuntu.com hardy/universe Translation-en_US
Ign http://us.archive.ubuntu.com hardy/multiverse Translation-en_US
Hit http://us.archive.ubuntu.com hardy-updates Release.gpg
Ign http://us.archive.ubuntu.com hardy-updates/main Translation-en_US
Ign http://us.archive.ubuntu.com hardy-updates/restricted Translation-en_US
Ign http://us.archive.ubuntu.com hardy-updates/universe Translation-en_US
Ign http://security.ubuntu.com hardy-security/universe Translation-en_US
Ign http://security.ubuntu.com hardy-security/multiverse Translation-en_US
Hit http://archive.canonical.com hardy Release
Hit http://security.ubuntu.com hardy-security Release
Ign http://us.archive.ubuntu.com hardy-updates/multiverse Translation-en_US
Hit http://us.archive.ubuntu.com hardy Release
Hit http://us.archive.ubuntu.com hardy-updates Release
Hit http://archive.canonical.com hardy/partner Packages
Hit http://security.ubuntu.com hardy-security/main Packages
Hit http://us.archive.ubuntu.com hardy/main Packages
Hit http://us.archive.ubuntu.com hardy/restricted Packages
Hit http://us.archive.ubuntu.com hardy/main Sources
Hit http://archive.canonical.com hardy/partner Sources
Hit http://security.ubuntu.com hardy-security/restricted Packages
Hit http://security.ubuntu.com hardy-security/main Sources
Hit http://security.ubuntu.com hardy-security/restricted Sources
Hit http://us.archive.ubuntu.com hardy/restricted Sources
Hit http://us.archive.ubuntu.com hardy/universe Packages
Hit http://us.archive.ubuntu.com hardy/universe Sources
Hit http://us.archive.ubuntu.com hardy/multiverse Packages
Hit http://us.archive.ubuntu.com hardy/multiverse Sources
Hit http://security.ubuntu.com hardy-security/universe Packages
Hit http://security.ubuntu.com hardy-security/universe Sources
Hit http://security.ubuntu.com hardy-security/multiverse Packages
Hit http://security.ubuntu.com hardy-security/multiverse Sources
Hit http://us.archive.ubuntu.com hardy-updates/main Packages
Hit http://us.archive.ubuntu.com hardy-updates/restricted Packages
Hit http://us.archive.ubuntu.com hardy-updates/main Sources
Hit http://us.archive.ubuntu.com hardy-updates/restricted Sources
Hit http://us.archive.ubuntu.com hardy-updates/universe Packages
Hit http://us.archive.ubuntu.com hardy-updates/universe Sources
Hit http://us.archive.ubuntu.com hardy-updates/multiverse Packages
Hit http://us.archive.ubuntu.com hardy-updates/multiverse Sources
W: Failed to fetch cdrom:[Kubuntu 8.04.1 _Hardy Heron_ - Release i386
(20080701. 2)]/dists/hardy/main/binary-i386/Packages.gz Please
use apt-cdrom to make this CD-ROM recognized by APT. apt-get
update cannot be used to add new CD-ROMs
W: Failed to fetch cdrom:[Kubuntu 8.04.1 _Hardy Heron_ - Release i386
(20080701. 2)]/dists/hardy/restricted/binary-i386/Packages.gz
Please use apt-cdrom to make this CD-ROM recognized by APT.
apt-get update cannot be used to add new CD-ROMs
E: Some index files failed to download, they have been ignored, or old ones
used instead.
stan at StanZ:~$
=========
When I powered back up, HAL is still loaded, but sleeping and neither my CD'DVD drive nor my thumb drive is recognized.
After that, I shut it down. Got some sleep and figured I'd start fresh this morning. After a clean power up this morning:
HAL is still not loading.
One last bit of info:
AMD 64bit CPU running Kubuntu 8.04 and KDE 3.5.10
The primary hard drive with the OS is 320Gb
The secondary (data) drive is 500Gb
Konqueror shows the primary drive mounted and I can see all the data on the data drive, but if I try to click the icon in Konq, it says 'only available with HAL'.
Any more ideas or should I break down and do another total rebuild of my primary drive?
Stan [the deeply frustrated]