I'm batting about 50% with this. However, it seems to me that maybe the Mac is scanning the memory. This appears to take a while--10-30 seconds--before actually turning the monitors on.
I can't narrow it down further. It's not the SCSI--since that's the boot drive. It's not the battery.
I appears to be going through another process. Anyone familiar with this process? I was looking in my Mac Bombs book and they talked about Macs checking their memory sometimes on startup before the Happy Mac appears and it goes through the rest of the boot sequence.
I'm guessing its performing one of those functions. When its doing what I would consider normal, the happy Mac comes on right away and the monitors come out of their sleep mode.
If I stop it while it appears to hang--what ever its doing--and turn it off and then reboot--it works fine with the happy mac and gray screen coming on immediately.
Hmm, what function is it doing on those odd times?