grub hangs

[Guest]

I have an older computer with two drives one for Ubuntu Karmic and I just loaded kubuntu 9.10. Now here is my problem:
When I reboot, my grub will hang for 40 seconds before rebooting into Ubuntu or Kubuntu. I'm sure that's not something that is normal. How can I correct that? Before youask.: I was taking Kubuntu for a test drive. I'm ditching windows completely.
Thanks for your help

[oshunluvr]

Re: grub hangs

First of all - there are two version of GRUB floating around these days. The original GRUB - now known as "GRUB Legacy" was the default for all flavors of ubuntu unitl 9.10 when it changed to the new GRUB - aka GRUB2 or GRUB-PC.

There are many differences so it makes a difference which one you're using. Two ways to tell: If you see "Stage 1.5" loading, thats old GRUB Legacy, GRUB2 does not have a stage 1.5. If you look at the files in /boot/grub - GRUB Legacy uses /boot/grub/menu.lst as it's config file and GRUB2 uses /boot/grub/grub.cfg.

If you did a full "clean" install of 9.10 - that is one from a CD; not an upgrade or Wubi install - then you have GRUB2.

The earliest versions of GRUB2 had issues with being installed on the masterboot record of one drive and booting off of the other drive in multi-drive systems. This sounds like what your seeing. Likely during that long "pause" you're experiencing there is almost constant drive activity.

The solution is to update GRUB2 to the latest version and it should go away.

[Qqmike]

Re: grub hangs

On systems with more than one disk (multi-boot), there's been a bug, which should be fixed (but maybe not for 9.10 yet?):
Current grub-pc takes several minutes to show menu
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+s...b2/+bug/420933

40 s isn't too bad ... annoying as the dickens, but could be worse according to some posters.