Curiouser and curiouser... I tried remove mdadm, lvm-common and lvm2. They rebooted and hooray, the wait is gone. They, in attempting to isolate where the problem was, I addeded them back one by one. Eventually, I had reinstalled all three packages, and the wait had still not come back. Something in the install/uninstall process I suppose?
To answer the rest of your questions -- the devices are /dev/hda (internal IDE) and /dev/sda (external USB), although the USB drive is not normally turned on at boot. The root device is specified to grub by UUID, I haven't tried changing this since the system appears to have unbroken itself anyway. -- Using UUID in /etc/fstab causes long delay on boot https://launchpad.net/bugs/66170 -- ubuntu-bugs mailing list ubuntu-bugs@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-bugs