Comment 100 for bug 420933

I had the same issues with a fresh install of karmic on my amd64 box. (Two SATA drives, first for XP, second for karmic - though I was seeing only a 10-15 second delay on boot and another few seconds pause on selecting an image to boot.) Telling the BIOS to prefer to boot from the second drive didn't initially help until I noticed that sdb1 - as set up by the karmic installer - hadn't been marked as bootable...! Manually setting the bootable flag fixed it.

I temporarily undid the fix and tried 1.98~experimental.20100105-0ubuntu1~ppa1 from Felix's PPA, which also fixed the issue.

Finally, a word of warning to any newbies reading this thread: don't put "set debug=all" in your grub config unless you are prepared to deal with a very slow boot. I tried it, out of interest, but got bored after about 15 minutes (there was a mind-boggling amount of uninteresting screen output) and ended up using a livecd to undo the change.