Comment 43 for bug 420077

I faced this issue on a karmic-server yesterday, upon rebooting after 4 months of uptime and around 2-3 kernel updates in the meantime.

Apparently it was the "recordfail" as mentioned in the comments above and in this post: http://ubuntuforums.org/showpost.php?p=8086168&postcount=6

Something went wrong in the first reboot. I was able to ping the box by IP but not by mDNS hostname, and was unable to access it over SSH. After hard reset, the box kept getting stuck on grub menu until I plugged in a monitor and a keyboard, hit enter to continue, booted normally and then rebooted.

There was nothing interesting in syslog. I can provide the logs as necessary.