I just had a little hardware problem and I want to share (with other beginners like myself) how I troubleshooted and solved it.
Suddenly, booting would take too long: black screen then "zorin 17.3" (~small font) in the middle with 4 small blinking dots under it, and after a while, when I pressed an arrow key, it showed a stuck message like:
From what I've read around, that is sometimes caused by computer probing various hardware some of which could be faulty (or driver problems).
I could not, from that screen, to get into a terminal (tried many keyboard combinations), so I restarted back to the Grub menu and chose the recovery option.
That one was very verbose and, in my case, it showed it was stuck with repeated messages like these: ata2: reset failed (errno=-32) ...retrying in 8 [or 33] seconds...
waiting those times and repeating over and over.
(Eventually, that loop stopped and it showed me the expected recovery menu).
Searching online gave that my hard drive disk's connections could be faulty.
So, after shutdown, I just physically re-inserted my hard drive and problem was gone.