I have a Toshiba Satellite L6745-D and am currently running CentOS-6 with grub 0.97 and believe I have found a bug. This happened to me about a year prior and thought at first it was related to the linux distro, but just recently have confirmed this to not be the case as I have been able to reproduce this on all current versions of Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Fedora, and CentOS (all using grub by default)
**Please let me know if this is NOT a bug so that I can do more investigation into the issue:
THE ISSUE:
If I reboot my machine (or power it on for that matter) and there is another monitor plugged into my VGA output port, after the POST and right when the GRUB bootloader menu should appear, I am presented with nothing other than a black/blank screen on both monitors. I have waited this out (like 30 minutes) and pretty sure it is doing nothing at all. If I simply reboot/power-down and remove the extra monitor, there is no issue with booting. Then after the GRUB bootloader menu is done and the Linux distro of choice begins to boot I can plug in the extra monitor and experience no problems.
I would assume this would have to do with my hardware as I expect most developers would be utilizing dual monitors and experience this problem immediately.
**This does not happen at all on FreeBSD as it uses its own bootloader.