The following reply was made to PR kern/36873; it has been noted by GNATS.

From: "Arne H. Juul" <arnej@pvv.ntnu.no>
To: gnats-bugs@NetBSD.org
Cc: 
Subject: Re: kern/36873: boot takes a long time when there are offline "disks"
Date: Fri, 31 Aug 2007 22:15:05 +0200 (CEST)

 > No, booting with offline drive (be they atapi, SCSI or USB) isn't a problem.
 > I think your reader is behaving in an unusual way.
 
 That's very possible of course, it was just a guess on my side from
 reading the messages on the console :-)
 
 Wouldn't it still make sense to skip offline drives when searching for 
 root disk?  (if that is where the time goes, that's also just a guess on 
 my side of course...)