Comment 15 for bug 420933

And now I found a workaround that fixed it for me.

To start with I had set up my computer like this:
SATA connector 1 --> 250Gb hard drive (sda) with grub 2 in the mbr, Gutsy installed on the first partition (sda1).
SATA connector 2 --> 1Tb hard drive (sdb), Karmic on the first partition (sdb1).
This setup had the delay (only 11s for me) before the boot menu loaded. When I added "set debug=all" to grub.cfg I got the same as in Dean's screenshots, and I never get the menu to load (gave up after an hour or so).

My workaround:
1. Installed grub 2 to the mbr 1Tb hard drive from within Karmic:
          sudo grub-install /dev/sdb
2. Switched the SATA cables around.
          connected the 1Tb drive to SATA connector 1. This is the only way I can change which SATA drive to boot from.
3. Now when I booted, I got the grub 2 boot menu to load without delay directly after the bios summary screen.
(4. To fix gutsy boot, which was broken by the switch, I simply had to run sudo update-grub from within karmic.)

Can't say that I know what caused the delay, but either grub 2 doesn't like my old 250 Gb drive or there's a problem with having grub 2 on the mbr on one drive when the boot folder is on another drive...