[ale] GRUB issue on boot

[Jim]

Since we're on the hot issue of boot loaders, I've had a problem with 
grub on one system for a long time.  It takes forever to boot.  It's an 
old 600 mhz Celeron booting from a 40 Mhz WD drive.

It comes up quickly with the first Grub 1.5 message, first stage, 
maybe?  I don't recall the exact format.  About a minute or two later, 
the second stage message comes up and after another minute+ the kernel 
starts to load.  I see the disk light is pretty solid during these times 
but I can't for the life of me figure out what is going on.

I Recently scrubbed the root partition (after backing it up) 
reinitialized the partition from scratch and did a net install of Debian 
3.1, hoping it would clear up.  No luck.  Fortunately I don't reboot 
this system very often.  It's just a test platform and file server of sorts.

There are no disk errors in the syslog, I'm running ext3 file systems, 
but the old one was ext2.  Does anyone have a clue as to what's going 
on?  I'm thinking about going to lilo after reading this thread.

Thanks,
Jim.