Crash during boot--Solved

[Adeswas]

Hi all.  I've been running pclos on this machine for awhile with no problems until recently.  It is as updated as possible--kernel, updates etc.  Running kde4.  During boot it crashes, when I go to verbose it stops at the line

NET: Registered protocol family 17

When I start in safe mode the last line before crashing is

Alsa driver is already running
doing alsactl to restore mixer set

In either case I'm able to type further characters however there is no prompt and the characters or commands do nothing.
I then try to shutdown by pressing the power button and all seems ok until it shows

mount: / is busy
system halted

I then have to reset.
Sorry, I'm not a programmer, just a hack.  If any additional info is required please ask.  Thanks
The plot thickens...after waiting what seemed like an eternity another line poped up saying

initializing HAL daemon [FAILED]
starting anacron

Now again, I'm no programmer but isn't the HAL daemon rather important?

[smcs_steve]

Adeswas,
I suspect the problem may not be software related - it might be a HDD/RAM issue.
Can you boot the PC on a live distro successfully? & does Firefox load OK? (FF loads up the RAM a bit)
GSmartcontrol might glean some details of your HDDs health.
>Steve

[kjpetrie]

Also, it might be an idea to boot from a livecd, ensure your partitions are NOT mounted, and run fsck on them in case there's filesystem corruption after the false starts.

[Adeswas]

Thanks for your help!  I'll try this and post back.

[Adeswas]

HDD problem