Sorry, I have no dmesg output, and couldn't verify if hald was the problem. But the same thing happened to me yesterday. Had to do a "hard reset". The problem seemed to be that I had not installed libdvdcss. That's not a reason for a total system freeze, but well, the DVD played fine after installing this.
I'm using Ubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy) on a P3 866. My CD/DVD drive is a HL-DT-ST DVDRAM GSA-4160B ~$ uname -a Linux A99-LeDechaine 2.6.22-14-generic #1 SMP Sun Oct 14 23:05:12 GMT 2007 i686 GNU/Linux -- system freeze while accessing DVD drive https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/75295 You received this bug notification because you are a member of Ubuntu Bugs, which is subscribed to Ubuntu. -- ubuntu-bugs mailing list ubuntu-bugs@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-bugs