It happens to me sometimes (using a vantec usb hdd adapter) if you press power while the HDD is in the middle of a read. The weird thing is HBC can read the drive perfectly fine after quitting the gamecube game, but if you start any other homebrew app from there it will hang during USB initialization (before it even tries to mount the HDD). At that point IOS has been reloaded at least twice so everything should be in a clean state.
The reason verification takes longer is most likely due to searching for free space to put the .dvv file, if you have a large drive that is fairly full it can take several seconds.
I'm not sure that reloading the same ios always clean usb related stuff. The worst thing is that sometime if you are in ios58 and reload ios58, the hdd is no more visibile (this happened, for example, in wiimednafen mod plugin. It was reloading ios58 to enable usb access, but it was not working from postloader (that reload ios58 before running dol) but worked in wiiflow (that was working in ios249). I have not idea if it is related to hdd usb interface or ios.














