HAL stall/crash

[MA & HB <bluestar@nordicwind.ca>]

Has anyone had any trouble with the hardware abstraction layer (HAL)
stalling and apparently crashing the boot on startup ?

(it just happened again to me today from a cold start)

This happens to me maybe once every 20 boots  .. although I was able to
repeat it 3 times in a row last week (hitting reset I think).

What happens is the boot up progresses as normal and when it is in
runlevel 2 and comes to start HAL I just get a message something like:

"Starting Hardware abstraction layer HALD: "

and it just hangs ... I wait a long long time (several minutes) and
finally hit the reset (control-C does nothing, can't go to another tty
terminal with alt-F1  (this is before xfce starts up)

This is a 686 debian-live lenny build from live-helper on a AMD Athlon(tm)
64 X2 Dual Core Processor 5200+ ... nvidia onboard video.

Any ideas on how to figureout what's going on here?

(more info: I boot from hard drive using grub)

I was thinking of rebuilding with HAL disabled and then starting it
manually with '/etc/init.d/hal start' later once booted hoping I'd be able
to get more info on what is going on from the log files .. and maybe be
able to kill it from another shell/tty. (I presume this would work ...)

I was also going to experiment with the 486 kernel and see if it ever
stalls with it.

mmm .. I should also see if I can get that 50meg syslink iso to fail
booting from cd.

Any other ideas?

thanks,
Harold