Comment 125 for bug 290153

Added findings:

(1) i was overly optimistic when I said that exiting the initramfs shell immediately helped. It often requires a wait of 30-60 seconds to succeed.
(2) an added observation that could shed some light: the hard-disk activity led lights up continously since 'booting' the grub selection. This continues *even after* getting the busybox prompt. Watching the activity light for inactivity is a very reliable indicator for 'disk readiness'. In other words, booting succeeds as soon as the hard disk activity has died down. Perhaps there is some disk scanning activity involved that takes a long time, locking the disk? Is there anyway to telling what the system is doing during that long period of disk activity?

Ok, so what should happen for this issue to get more attention? All I can see now is that this ticket is 'Invalid' and various other confusing states in a large number of packages(?). I appreciate if no-one knows exactly what is going on, but it seems pretty clear that it is a pervasive problem and bogs many users.

I'm willing to help out with whatever smart questions that might be asked. At the moment, though I'm at a loss.