system hanging after booting
 

my gutsy laptop started behaving in a strange way since yesterday.i moment i boot it,it hangs.opening the terminal or for that matter any window,does not show the three icons(min,max,close)on the top right corner.i cannot move any window,i cannot access my hard disk as all media from desktop becomes invisible the moment i click on any of them.the screen flickers and then shows the desktop without the removable media icons?what should i do?

Did you change / install / upgrade anything on the system?

If you did none of this, it sounds as if you might have some kind of severe hardware problem. It could be that some device has gone bad, or is not getting started properly when the module that drives it is getting loaded, etc. etc.

Basically it can be just about anything. You have four options:

1. Use a rescue disk

If you have a rescue disk for your distro, start it up and see if you get the same behaviour if running in text mode

2. Use Windows

Counter-intuitive maybe, but I have often identified bad hardware this way. If the PC / laptop misbehaves in Linux, and you happen to have Windows installed, start Windows up and check if the same type of failure / problem occurs there. If it DOES, you know that you have a hardware problem.

3. Start in text mode

If your rescue disk works, edit /etc/inittab and set your starting runlevel to 3 (at least, this works on Fedora Core 6) so that your system starts in text mode and won't start Xwindows by itself. If it seems to be stable and working in text mode, try starting Xwindows by typing

in the text terminal. If your problems then start, you know at least that your trouble lies with the graphics sub-system or your x-windows installation, but the rest of your system should be good (since it works in text mode...)

4. Reformat and reinstall

This is the final, most extreme solution. If you have some kind of misconfiguration or failed auto-update causing the problem, this might solve it by reverting your system to known, stable, and working state.

To me this looks like a hard disk failure.Time to replace I guess. If you have Smart you can do some testing with;
or
for example,or you can try http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/.

no.i tried to upgrade it to hardy from gutsy.then i terminated it as it was taking too long starting from the image.but then it worked fine for s2 days and this problem pops.if its because of upgrade,shouldnt it show immediately?
also my windows is running fine.so i think no problem with harddisk or hardware...

There's your problem then - when installing or upgrading, like with any operating system, leave it to finish... You probably interrupted the process in the middle of setting up something XWindows related, or when it was busy copying a file, etc. etc. - it can be just about -anything-.

You'll now probably be forced to reformat and reinstall, since you interrupted a very sensitive process at an undefined point, leaving your system structure and files in an undefined state. It's a miracle it worked at all afterwards...

but is there a way to fix it without reinstalling?i already made a backup of all the home folder before i did the upgrade...

Highly unlikely... you have files and maybe even the filing system itself in an undefined state, since you interrupted a critical process... really the only thing that will definitely solve your problem is to completely reformat and reinstall.

yeah i have made a re inatallation of hardy.was not left with much of a choice i guess.thanks for ur support anyway...