As I indicated loosly in the end of my last message: The problem goes away when I flash a normal hijack kernel on, and reappars the first boot with the ext3 kernel. So I tend to agree, some sort of glitch in ext3 is managing to cause this.

The scarry part was when I took my player out to the car after going to ext3 on Tuesday. It booted to the dead penguin and the error of "No drives detected". Powercycling it right away didn't help, but 5 mins later it came back, but with the above noted delay in the boot.

The above problem made me really think it was the hard drive failing, but considering it goes away with the normal kernel, well, I'm a bit puzzled.