Grub, ntfs external hard drives, hanging up!

[Rick]

Here something that is very odd, after doing some updates,
had to reboot...

Have 3 external usb drives, that are formatted in ntfs.
for some wired reason, when rebooting, did not even reach the grub menu,
to select either ubuntu or windows vista...

it just hung there... ( did it 4 times )
once I un-plug the usb drives, goto the grub menu.

everyone told me that formatting from fat32 to ntfs is better
well, this would be the first time in 2 years, I ever had a reboot
problem with ubuntu or my external hard usb hard drives.

Need Help ( Thanks in Advance)

Richard
Ubuntu 8.04 ( with all the updates)