> A common cause of this is hdparm, where we have a problem 
> with certain "one-in-a-million" combinations of hardware.

I knew i am a special person ..... OK,ok my Computer is.  SCNR ;)

Erm..

Well you do not even know how much i await eagerly your input Scott James Remnant.

In the meantime i installed Ubuntu complete new.
Since I have /home and /var/cache/apt/archives/ on seperate partitions this was just some time to spend and nothing to lose.

Damn is Dapper fast.  ;)

After your mail I put the hdparm konfiguration back in place and was able (after some reboots) to repeat "the error".
Before that Dapper boots really fast, i was suprised.
The time from power on to gdm took only maybe 20sec i think.

Now after i turned on dma it´s like up the pole.

Here my data:
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
# hdparm /dev/hda

/dev/hda:
 multcount    =  0 (off)
 IO_support   =  1 (32-bit)
 unmaskirq    =  1 (on)
 using_dma    =  1 (on)
 keepsettings =  0 (off)
 readonly     =  0 (off)
 readahead    = 256 (on)
 geometry     = 39761/16/63, sectors = 40079088, start = 0

# hdparm /dev/hdc

/dev/hdc:
 IO_support   =  1 (32-bit)
 unmaskirq    =  1 (on)
 using_dma    =  1 (on)
 keepsettings =  0 (off)
 readonly     =  0 (off)
 readahead    = 256 (on)
 HDIO_GETGEO failed: Invalid argument

# hdparm /dev/hdd

/dev/hdd:
 IO_support   =  1 (32-bit)
 unmaskirq    =  1 (on)
 using_dma    =  1 (on)
 keepsettings =  0 (off)
 readonly     =  0 (off)
 readahead    = 256 (on)
 HDIO_GETGEO failed: Invalid argument

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

# dmesg | grep hd
[4294667.296000] Kernel command line: root=/dev/hda2 ro quiet splash vga=0x317 hdc=ide_cd rootflags=commit=21
[4294667.296000] ide_setup: hdc=ide_cd -- BAD OPTION
[4294671.157000]     ide0: BM-DMA at 0xfc00-0xfc07, BIOS settings: hda:DMA, hdb:pio
[4294671.157000]     ide1: BM-DMA at 0xfc08-0xfc0f, BIOS settings: hdc:DMA, hdd:DMA
[4294671.543000] hda: WDC WD205AA, ATA DISK drive
[4294672.966000] hdc: SONY CD-RW CRX140E, ATAPI CD/DVD-ROM drive
[4294673.680000] hdd: HITACHI DVD-ROM GD-5000, ATAPI CD/DVD-ROM drive
[4294673.754000] hda: max request size: 128KiB
[4294673.879000] hda: 40079088 sectors (20520 MB) w/2048KiB Cache, CHS=39761/16/63, UDMA(66)
[4294673.879000] hda: cache flushes not supported
[4294673.880000]  hda: hda1 hda2 hda3 hda4 < hda5 hda6 hda7 hda8 >
[4294674.005000] hdc: ATAPI 32X CD-ROM CD-R/RW drive, 4096kB Cache, UDMA(33)
[4294674.036000] hdd: ATAPI 40X DVD-ROM drive, 512kB Cache, DMA
[4294691.439000] hdc: set_drive_speed_status: status=0x51 { DriveReady SeekComplete Error }
[4294691.439000] hdc: set_drive_speed_status: error=0x24 { AbortedCommand LastFailedSense=0x02 }
[4294751.438000] hdd: lost interrupt
[4294752.399000] Adding 1124416k swap on /dev/hda3.  Priority:-1 extents:1 across:1124416k
[4294752.491000] EXT3 FS on hda2, internal journal
[4294753.288000] EXT3 FS on hda1, internal journal
[4294753.334000] EXT3 FS on hda5, internal journal
[4294753.335000] EXT3 FS on hda6, internal journal

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

as you can see:
hdc: SONY CD-RW CRX140E, ATAPI CD/DVD-ROM drive
hdd: HITACHI DVD-ROM GD-5000, ATAPI CD/DVD-ROM drive

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

> When you boot the computer, press Esc to get into the boot loader menu
I have set:
timeout         7 
in /boot/grub/menu.lst

and yes before i added the hdparm config in /etc/hdparm.conf everything was really smooth and fast.

Thank you Scott James Remnant