As Fedora uses a simple and clean screen hiding all Linux kernel boot messages, a normal user wouldn’t notice the following error that delays boot by 10 seconds.

Could not detect stabilization, waiting 10 seconds

Once can see this error message on the screen if he or she presses Esc key. The Esc works both in text-mode boot and graphical-mode boot.

To get rid of problem of 10 seconds delay, just add the following option to kernel command line options in “/etc/grub.conf“.

rootdelay=1

For example, my grub.conf contains an entry similar to the following.

title Fedora 11
root (hd0,2)
kernel /vmlinuz.fc11.i686 ro root=/dev/sda1 rhgb rootdelay=1
initrd /initrd.fc11.i686.img

From next reboot onwards, you should be seeing relatively faster boot.

It is possible to reduce this delay to 0 seconds by modifying initrd file. However it is not recommended as it is not so straight forward for a standard user. For that you can modify /lib/initcpio/init file to accept a value of 0 for rootdelay. However before trying this it is highly recommended that a new entry be added in /etc/grub.conf and work on a copied file of corresponding initrd file. In any case, one second delay is not as bad as 10 seconds delay and you can live with that.