Suddenly MANY things broken!? - HAL Help

OK, so I took my AA1 on holiday, on the journey it was fine, I was browsing some sites I had saved on to it etc, all great.

I used it fine on the Saturday and Sunday of last week, then on the Monday...

I turned it on and:

1. Internal Error: 'Failed to initalize HAL' error
2. It refused to recognise the memory stick of my psp (which it was doing fine before)
3. Similarly it refused to recognise my external drive (I tried remounting and unmounting it etc)
4. The webcam no longer works: No Supported video capture device found (not a big deal as I don't use the webcam much, but irritating)
5. It cannot tell if it's running off the power adaptor or the battery - when just the battery the task bar icon is the same - the 2 pronged plug and 'plugged in' when you hover over it.

So, I'm home today and thought I'd get the internet up on it and have a play around - now it refuses to connect to the very same network it seamlessly connected to last week!

Being a Linux newbie I didn't know what I could do, so I have had a pretty useless lappy for the best part of a week :roll:

I still don't know the best thing to do - how involved / what's required to wipe it and start a fresh? (I have no documents on there and all I had done was remove some of the language packs to gain space and install fspot and vlc etc - nothing which took ages)

Your comments welcome - as at present I have a pretty useless bit of kit it seems!

 

Re: Suddenly MANY things broken!?

OK, it gets worse... I have created a recovery memory stick (on a sony memory stick duo).

I followed the instructions in the book to boot to the usb stick, by pressing F12 and the ONLY two options are

1. IDE 0: (SSDPAM...) and
2. Network Boot: Legacy PCI Device

Neither of which are sounding that USB like to me!!

 

Re: Suddenly MANY things broken!?

Hopefully, it's not a hardware issue.

The way to reinstall, at least with what we have in the US, requires another computer and a USB stick. Did you get a recovery CD with the computer? Here in the US, there's one in the box--you boot another computer from the CD and it gives the option to install to a USB stick, with the warning that you will lose all contents of the USB stick.

When it's done, you boot the Aspire One from the USB. (Hit F12 as it's powering up and you get the option to switch boot order--one is for the USB.

When it boots, you get a dialog offering to reinstall the system. It's pretty clear, I think, accept the defaults (I think it's entire hard drive, though I forget what the other choice is.)

(Or, if you have a USB external CD drive, you can use that instead of the USB stick thing--just boot from that external CD drive and do the same thing, choose to reinstall system.)

So, to sum up--first of all, you have to have the recovery CD.
Then, you either need an external USB CD drive or a second computer with optical drive.
If that's the case, you also need a USB stick with no important data, as it will be completly overwritten.

 

Re: Suddenly MANY things broken!?

Hi scottro,

Yes, I have the recovery DVD and I have made a recovery usb stick using my pc and a sony psp memory stick (worked fine in the AA1 before, so should be fine - its just a flash drive after all)

The problem comes in when I boot up and hit F12 - none of the boot options mention the USB drive.

I reckon I might need to get rid of the HAL initialization problem before I can recover - I took a look here:
http://blog.ubrio.us/nix/ubuntu-error-h ... -solution/

And, as instructed ran this in terminal:

Code:

sudo /usr/sbin/hald --daemon=no --verbose=yes

Sure enough the address already in use error came up as the author of the blog mentions, so I tried to fix it using his commands too:

Code:

sudo /etc/init.d/udev restart

But Terminal tells me:

 

That's an Ubuntu command for udev. In Fedora I only know of /sbin/start_udev.

A bit of googling indicates that
sudo killall udevd; sudo /sbin/start_udev

will stop and start it. (Actually, it might be enough to just do the /sbin/start_udev as that seems to kill the old process and begin a new one. )

I don't know if that will solve the problem though. (I think you typed your second post as I was answering your first---sorry to duplicate information that you already had.)

 

Thanks scottro, unfortunately it still doesn't work :/ - I still get the HAL error on boot and it still refuses to see the flash drives it saw before.

Still not managed to get the internet back on it either ... pretty useless atm

 

Seeing the flash drive with F12 on boot is not a Linux issue (nor udev issue) but rather that is done from the BIOS. Either there's something wrong with the flash drive, the usb subsystem itself or somehow your BIOS got corrupted.

Cheers.

 

A Sony memory stick duo is a type of memory card that goes in the cardreader slot, and cannot be booted from. To recover you need to use a USB flash drive, one that plugs into the USB slot, as the BIOS cannot see the cardreader until drivers for it are loaded by the OS. Something you can try before restoring to defaults though is deleting the directory '/home/user/.config/xfce4' and reboot, that may fix up your HAL errors and avoid having to recover.

 

Ahh, I plugged a standard pen drive in and it allowed me to boot from it (if I wanted, which I didn't as it is just a generic memory stick with files on it)

So......... to save me making the recovery thing again, and the acer CD possibly buggering up my PC can I use a card reader - i.e. one that plugs in to the USB port and then use any card - will the acer see this the same as a usb device? (I only have 1 1gb pen drive as I tend to use flash memory for psp, nds, camera etc - and everything has card readers these days!)

Also... as a slight aside, if I managed to build the recovery usb thing on a flash drive yesterday with no errors on the PC I used then will it work again if I do it on this usb stick... AND will a 1gb Scan Disk Cruzer micro u3 thing confuse it and mess it up?

 

I tried that already after reading it in a thread last night - unfortunately it didn't help :/