Problem with HAL

source:http://www.teknopipo.nl/telco/files/tag-ubuntu.html
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HAL bug in Ubuntu
18/05/08 18:50 Filed in: network configuration
This weekend I finally pulled myself together and upgraded my home server to Ubuntu 8.04, also known as Hardy Hudson. After a seemingly painless upgrade process, I rebooted and logged in, and the system presented me with the following error message:

Internal error: HAL Failed to initialize

Annoying as this message may be, the biggest problem was that Hardy would no longer mount any of my external drives. After nosing around on the web, I've seen several suggested solutions, varying from tweaking etc/init.d scripts, reconfiguring HAL to completely reinstalling Ubuntu. The problem also occurs on earlier kernels. If I had to guess, I'd say the error is somehow related to the problems I've been having with an external USB drive from Freecom (400GB). Basicly I've been repartitioning and reformatting that thing in every format imaginable, but I can't seem to get it to behave properly... HAL means Hardware Abstraction Layer, and most people I've seen reporting the above error have some kind of issue with a faulty DVD drive that fails to mount, for example.

Of course the first thing I tried was to remove the external USB drive and reboot to see if that solved anything, and it didn't. Maybe my buggy drive messed up some configuration file or something, so I then tried the suggested solution to reinstall HAL which seemed to solve the problem to some extent. I no longer got the error, but my desktop failed to initialize properly, I was just getting a blank screen and a task bar. And after a reboot the error was back again, so not much luck there.

Another suggested solution was to sudo mkdir /var/run/PolicyKit, whatever the hell that means. I checked to see if that dir was there, and it was, so no need to run the mkdir.... but what I did notice, was that its ownership was set to polkituser:polkituser. After typing groups in a terminal, I noticed that my userid was not in the polkituser group, so I figured that was the problem. And it was. After I typed...

sudo usermod -a -G polkituser [myuserid]

...I relogged in and everything was working flawlessly. Don't forget the -a option or you'll fuck up your system. Out.

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https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux-ubuntu-modules-2.6.24/+bug/212271

http://www.uluga.ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=365442&page=3

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SOURCE:
http://www.danielhardy.com/blog/making-friends-with-hal/
As of late I have been having some trouble with HAL(Hardware Abstraction Layer). I
finally found the solution and decided I would post it here in case anyone else my need it. The symptoms of this problem are simple. When Gnome boots up you get an error stating “failed to initialize HAL”. There are many problems that can cause this error but the one that I keep running into was tricky to find but extremely easy to resolve.

It boils down to a boot order issue where dbus and HAL are scheduled to boot at the same time. The problem with this is that often HAL requires dbus to be up and running. To figure out if this is the specific cause you can take a look at the /etc/rc2.d/ folder. You simply want to make sure HAL’s three digit prefix comes after dbus’s. For example “S12dbus” followed by “S13hal”. If it doesn’t simply execute something like the following command in the terminal. Make sure you change it to match your system.

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

If you have ran into this problem I hope this will help you get it fixed.