I have tried recompiling the kernel on Mandriva 2007.0 to fix a bug where by a touchpad isn't recognised. Although it seems to compile OK, when I now boot and choose the new image, the boot freezes at this line:

Starting HAL daemon [ OK ]

The only error I can see before that is:

Starting wltool: [Failed]

I've tried a recompile about five times now and nothing makes any difference it seems. Anyone know why that might be? Or can suggest a method of tracking this down? Please ask if any other information would help track it down. I'm in over my head really and am not sure where to start!

I have searched high and low on the web and found other mentions of HAL daemon failing, but not freezing when it says it's OK!

Many thanks.

Wonder if the service that tries to start after HAL is hanging up, not HAL itself?

Look in a file called /etc/inittab for a line (probably one of the first) like thisThat number tells you what runlevel you boot into. Then look in the directory /etc/rc.d/rc#.d (rc3.d in this example). You should see a symlink named S##haldaemon. Alphanumerically after that would be the next service to start. For example, mine is S20haldaemon and the next one is S25cups.

Thanks for the suggestions Arow. Just before I gave in to sleep last night I made a lot of progress on this and found your reply when I woke up this morning.

I found another post on here for a vaguely similar issue with Fedora; that suggested looking at boot levels. After playing about with it I found that I could boot to level two and then startx. This then ran KDE, and my kernel mod had solved my touchpad issue.

I then rebooted and did interactive boot (I had completely forgotten this is possible, it's so long since I needed to do that). When it got to the touchpad part and asked if I wanted to start it, when I said yes, it went and installed some drivers from the installation DVD.

It boots happily now, which I guess is the main thing!