Not reached assertion failed in boredom_timeout

This also happens with default Lucid kernel.

Ubuntu lucid sometimes cannot boot, this usually happens after install some new packages or after install some updates, so will this issue be related to package management in any way?
When the issue occurs, the playmouth boot splash is showed and never ends, if I hit enter, then splash goes away and this message appears:
"mountall: mountall.c:2726: Not reached assertion failed in boredom_timeout"
After this Ubuntu drops to a maintenance shell.

ProblemType: Bug
Architecture: i386
Date: Tue Mar 23 17:23:04 2010
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 10.04
InstallationMedia: Error: [Errno 13] Permiso denegado: '/var/log/installer/media-info'
NonfreeKernelModules: wl
Package: mountall 2.8
ProcEnviron:
 LANG=es_ES.utf8
 SHELL=/bin/bash
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 2.6.32-16.25-generic
SourcePackage: mountall
Uname: Linux 2.6.32-16-generic i686

The bug related to eternal "waiting for / [SM]" appears to be a real problem then.

The message "mountall.c:2726: Not reached assertion failed" is unfortunately not helpful though. I've looked at mountall.c, and that message is simply because we both pressed <ENTER>, when the valid choices were "[SM]", ie S (skip) or M (maintenance shell). There appears to be a buglet here: either plymouth_prompt should not be allowing <ENTER>, or mountall.c should be handling it. But the message is unfortunately not telling us anything about why "/" is not available.

From mountall.c:

  message = NIH_MUST (nih_sprintf (NULL, _("Waiting for %s [SM]"),
       MOUNT_NAME (mnt)));

  answer = plymouth_prompt (NULL, message, "SsMm");
                if (answer is null or is S or is M) // real code removed for brevity..
                    ..
                else
   nih_assert_not_reached (); // <== the failure message seen above

It also happens me, when I last updated lucid.
Do you have a ntfs partition? This is the one that mountall.c can't mount in my case....

No, I have no ntfs partition. The one I can't mount is '/', of type ext4 (see grub.cfg entry above).

What I have noticed is that if I get the 'waiting for / [SM]' message, and select M then ctrl-d, booting continues correctly.

This suggests to me that the filesystem ('/' in my case) did in fact mount correctly, and it is just that mountall or plymouth never noticed.

This makes sense; both mountall and plymouth are new. This bug is also intermittent for me, which suggests a race condition. Mounting drives is old and established code, so a race condition is unlikely. The new code for *detecting* that the mount has happened, however, could well be racy. (warning: pure speculation)

I have this problem in every time I turn on my pc, and I have realised that
my two hdd are called hde and hdf. And hdf isn't mounted, I have to use
ntfs-config.

I can continue using ubuntu, but it's annoying....

I have the same problem on Lucid beta. My seconds drive don't want to be mounted with the same error.
Very annoying.