When booting from both the install CD and from an installed system, my laptop hangs indefinitely at several points until a key is pressed. No error messages are displayed on the text console, verifying the CD comes up clean, and fsck of installed filesystem comes up clean. Booting the installed system in recovery mode, I see that two of these places are when drivers are loading, both to do with USB. The first is when it says "USB 2-2: using new driver" etc etc. It just sits there forever until I press a key, any key. The second is where it say "USB video" (USB video? what the heck is that?). Ditto. I had an apparently clean working version until something got screwed up with the wifi and I couldn't figure it out, so I thought it's be easier to just reinstall than scratch my head for another day. That's when I started having problems with it hanging on startup. I just did yet another re-install. When it was all done, after it said "press enter to finish", I pressed enter and it froze again. Switching to a text console, zillions of error messages were scrolling by, much too fast to read, but something about "input/output error". I saw those when I was trying to figure out the thumbdrive persistence problem (files weren't being saved) and assumed it was a bad thumbdrive. But I'm not using one now. Is this my harddisk failing? If so, how can I test it? Then the errors ended with a long series of complaints about missing apport modules. That's the crash dump analyser right? So how do I find out what's going on if the debug tools are missing from the install? I should also note that memtest doesn't find any memory errors. Why would it hang loading a driver until a key is pressed? My best guess is that I have some kind of hardware problem but I am completely at a loss how to even begin to guess what it might be. Clues appreciated, dd