Said, another way: No its not normal, something is taking a while to respond. Do you have any Peripheral devices you can unplug and retry booting? One of them is likely creating some problem. unplug your printer, usb memory, etc... and try rebooting. Is it faster? If it is, try inserting one device at a time back into your system, and rebooting to identify the troubling device. figure out the troubled device, and post back. you might check your disk integrity (SMART Analysis)

The log you want to look at is (probably): /var/log/syslog

you might also try going into your bios, and disabling things like the parallel port, and other unused hardware, such that you don’t need to waste time initializing ports you aren't using.