This bug is very Windows’ish in its annoyance. If for some reason the computer crashes or is improperly shutdown then the computer will hang at its grub menu selection

GNU GRUB version 1.97~beta4
Ubuntu, Linux 2.6.31-14-generic
ubuntu, Linux 2.6.31-14-generic (recovery mode)
Memory test (memtest86+)
Memory test (memtest86+, serial console 115200)

etc

But there is no countdown for a default boot. It just hangs here… Indefinitely… Until someone at the console makes a choice by pressing the enter key with “Ubuntu, Linux 2.6.31-14-generic” highlighted (default).

This is unacceptable!! I need these systems to continue to boot and get back on line regardless of the reason they were powered off. If the server is rebootable, then by all means, let it boot! I see no reason to physically access it and manually boot it. Perhaps once network is restored, an admin can then ssh into the device and repair whatever brought the server down in the first place. Or maybe it was just a simple power failure, and once the power is restored the server should boot right back up so customers can access the server and the commerce can continue. Maybe the server goes down at midnight and it takes several hours to get the IT guy out of bed and into work and to the data closet, where he has to scrounge up a keyboard and monitor and plug it all up so he can hit the enter key. Of course, this will all be overtime for the IT guy, and possibly after hours charges would apply. Forcing someone to physically access the device just to hit the enter key is ridiculous, and the grub2 developers should be ashamed. Have I expressed, sufficiently, how dumb this feature is?

But, there is a work around. Long story short,

sudo nano /etc/grub.d/00_header

and comment out the following section by putting a # before each line.

if [ ${recordfail} = 1 ]; then
set timeout=-1
else
set timeout=${GRUB_TIMEOUT}
fi

then

sudo update-grub

So you need to do this on any server booting with grub2. Which includes ubuntu 9.10, and probably 10.4. What was wrong with good old grub1 anyway?