Hi,
IIRC, on older notebooks, there was a default time delay in the boot
process (setting in BIOS, I think) that allowed the hard drive time to spin up to full
speed before being accessed.
I have a 10 year old IBM Thinkpad 240X (500MHz P4, dual boot W2k & Debian Etch), and
it does the same thing whether it's running off the battery or AC. After grub loads,
boot proceeds normally.
This may not be your problem, but it should be examined in any case.
I am quite sure this is not the case, as grub-loading was fast before
updating to Fedora-11.
I'll post menu.lst soon, but I doubt it will give any useful insights :/
Thanks, Clemens