Grub uses harddrive a lot before starting

[Daniel Gullberg]

After a fresh installed UbuntuStudio Karmic (9.10), grub 2 takes a long time to start at every boot. My harddrive LED is constantly lit for about 20 seconds before reaching the list where I can choose the different kernels. What is grub doing with my harddrive all that time? Is there a logfile where I can see what it has been doing?

Just before the UbuntuStudio installation I installed another (rather old) harddrive. It is possible that the main problem is this harddrive. Right now my configuration is:
IDE1: master: 80 GB, slave 160GB
IDE2: master: old 60GB (for the UbuntuStudio installation), slave DVD

My old install was Ubuntu 9.04 on the 80 GB harddrive and as far as I know that used grub 1. Started in a glance...

[Evžen Šubrt (evzen-subrt)]

I confirm that too. Luckyly, it takes only about 5 seconds to see the grub2 menu. During this time i see only "loading grub" message and hear intensive hard-drive-seeking noise.

[Felix Zielcke (fzielcke)]

Please press `c' at the menu to go to command line and type
 echo $prefix
or if you can't find $ because of the US keyboard layout we use in GRUB you can also use just
 set
If prefix contains (UUID=) then this probable is a duplicate of https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/grub2/+bug/420933

[Daniel Gullberg (dangu)]

Yes, my $prefix contains UUID=...

I agree that this is a duplicate of 420933!