bwallum, one of the external HDDs I tried is a USB-powered SATAII drive and I get the same delay.
It looks like it's not due to the filesystem, kernel or distro version difference. Perhaps the problem has something to do with Grub's (and Grub2's) method of accessing external USB disks and/or mounting their filesystems.
Btw this looks related: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=961493
Here the external USB HDD is used as a backup only, yet the user describes the problem as: "Very slow boot at Grub stage2 (minutes, reports user). No other anomalies post boot. Normal boot time when an external backup hard drive is switched off."
bwallum, one of the external HDDs I tried is a USB-powered SATAII drive and I get the same delay.
It looks like it's not due to the filesystem, kernel or distro version difference. Perhaps the problem has something to do with Grub's (and Grub2's) method of accessing external USB disks and/or mounting their filesystems.
Btw this looks related: http:// ubuntuforums. org/showthread. php?t=961493
Here the external USB HDD is used as a backup only, yet the user describes the problem as: "Very slow boot at Grub stage2 (minutes, reports user). No other anomalies post boot. Normal boot time when an external backup hard drive is switched off."