freeze during bootup/have to press keys to bring up login screen

Video of what happens, at 46 seconds I hit the enter key, sorry for the poor quality.

[This is an automatic notification.]

Thanks for reporting this bug to help making the Intel graphics driver
better. We hear from upstream that a number of bugs (possibly including
this one) have been fixed in the newer DRM code from the 2.6.33 kernel.
I don't know if your bug is one of the ones fixed in this release,
though, but we've prepared a PPA with this DRM update. Would you mind
installing this, rebooting, and testing if the original issue can be
reproduced with it or not?

The DRM PPA is here:

    https://edge.launchpad.net/~apw/+archive/red

Note there could be new bugs... please file these as new reports using
the command 'ubuntu-bug linux' (for kernel or DRM or KMS bugs) or
'ubuntu-bug xorg' if you suspect them to be X.org issues.

Heya,

Installed the updates however no luck, the issue is still happening.

Fix found by Fish: Disabling splash in the bootloader fixes it

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/plymouth/+bug/518559/comments/11

Which involves:

1. in terminal: sudo gedit /etc/default/grub
2. remove "splash" from the line: GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash"
3. save and close gedit, then type sudo update-grub
4. reboot and all should be good.

Well, that runs into bug #518352....

The only thing I can add is that I have 5 installations of 10.04 on the same hardware (1 box using an external enclosure for the test platform) and I have one installation that never has a problem. It is very similar to 2 other installs (triple redundancy as I do use this as my production OS during the daytime) that do have this problem.

The fix given in #5 didn't work. This might be a different bug (or not, I don't know how the stuff works).

If it helps, the login screen drums sound plays twice. Once when it goes to a terminal, and it plays again after I press enter and the login screen comes up.

This bug was fixed in the package plymouth - 0.8.0~-13

---------------
plymouth (0.8.0~-13) lucid; urgency=low

  [ Steve Langasek ]
  * Don't attach /proc/cmdline to apport reports, this is already in the
    standard info that gets collected...

  [ Alberto Milone ]
  * ubuntu_logo theme:
    - New logo from Otto Greenslade.
    - Switch off dots starting from the ones on the left instead of
      switching them off all at once.

  [ Scott James Remnant ]
  * Move the Ubuntu logo up as discussed with Otto, this makes the mouse
    cursor appear between the logo and dots and solves the optical illusion
    of the logo being too low. LP: #535014.
  * Don't include message about disk checks, which can come from mountall.
  * Drop the rc script splash functions, we don't want the SysV-rc compat
    stuff messing around with the splash screen - this can be entirely
    managed by Upstart now. LP: #528787, #537262.

  * Plymouth Fix Mega Patch:
    - This hasn't yet been broken up into enough bits to send upstream, and
      doesn't *quite* address all the issues yet, but it's a major step.

    - Rewrite the VT handling, rather than abusing /dev/tty0 keep all VT
      operations on the actual VT (tty7), this avoids issues where we set
      the graphics mode of the wrong VT or put the wrong VT into VT_PROCESS
      mode. LP: #520460, #522598, #526321, #533135
    - Don't attempt VT switch when using non-VT consoles.
    - Make VT mandatory for renderer plugins, so we fallback gracefully to
      text when the console is not a VT. LP: #516825, #527083.
    - Restore VT when finished displaying the splash unless plymouth quit
      is called with --retain-splash. LP: #506297.
    - Activate VT from text and details plugins, rather than haphardly in
      the main code, this means the textual boot is also on VT7.
      LP: #518352, #520122.
    - Add a --has-active-vt command that can let gdm inquire whether it
      should reuse Plymouth's VT; fixes the issue where Plymouth has no
      visible splash screen and X ends up on VT1. LP: #519641, #533572.

    - Don't open terminal device in X11, fixes the issue where X will crash
      when debugging plugins using the X11 renderer.
    - Add --tty option to plymouthd for debugging when X is running and
      thus using an alternate VT.

    - Improve deactivate command so that the terminal is no longer watched
      for keyboard input, session is closed, etc. LP: #528787, #531650.
    - Ignore mode changes while deactivated, otherwise we can end up
      resetting the VT back into text mode while X is starting up.
      LP: #523788, #502509.

    - Fix races with simultaneous quit and deactivate commands, or multiples
      of those commands.
    - Ignore --show-splash, --hide-splash, etc. commands while deactivated.
    - Add reactivate command for testing purposes.

    - Don't scan out drm buffer contents to fbcon when not called with
      quit --retain-splash. LP: #527180.

    - Avoid resetting the terminal to unbuffered mode on every write, this
      results in setting X's VT into raw mode and results in the X server
      crashing on key presses. LP: #532047, #534861, #519460, #520...

The suggestion in #5 is not a fix, merely an unreliable workaround for a bug that's probably a race condition. Please re-test with the newly uploaded plymouth 0.8.0~-13 and mountall 2.8 once they're available.