Comment 11 for bug 148466

I've found a work round which lets me boot my fedora machine on the latest kernel. I needed to append:

libata.pata_dma=1

.. to the kernel boot options. I'm not sure if this option is present in all kernels (I think it's in Debian, so it's probably in Ubuntu), but it made my drive start working reliably again.

For reference there is a more general bug in redhats bugzilla which is tracking this and other related issues (which seem to affect a lot of systems). The bug reference is:

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=242956

Hope this works for you too.