Bug#404504: grub freezes at menu screen with WD USB hard drive attached

[Norman Ramsey]

Package: grub
Version: 0.97-20
Severity: important

I noticed recently that grub started responding to a USB keyboard at boot time.
This is great!  But there's a problem: I just attached an external USB
hard drive (Westeran Digital 500GB 'MyBook'), and with this drive
attached and turned on, grub displays the boot menu and freezes.
Does not count down, does not boot, does not respond to keystrokes.

The workaround is to boot the machine, turn off the hard drive, hit
the reset button.  Then once the boot sequence is started, the hard
drive can be turned on again.

I've attached output from 'lsusb -v' so you can see what's known about
the devices.  The offending hard drive is the first device listed.

-- System Information:
Debian Release: 4.0
  APT prefers testing
  APT policy: (500, 'testing'), (500, 'stable'), (50, 'unstable')
Architecture: i386 (i686)
Shell:  /bin/sh linked to /bin/bash
Kernel: Linux 2.6.17-2-k7
Locale: LANG=C, LC_CTYPE=C (charmap=ANSI_X3.4-1968)

Versions of packages grub depends on:
ii  libc6                        2.3.6.ds1-8 GNU C Library: Shared libraries
ii  libncurses5                  5.5-5       Shared libraries for terminal hand

grub recommends no packages.

-- no debconf information