Comment 41 for bug 149076

I've been using a work around here for a few weeks to test and it seems to be working. BONUS - no symlinks and you can try it without any permanent changes.

1. When Grub loads hit the key to edit the commands "e", this should bring up a series of lines "root", "kernel", and "initrd".
2. You want to modify the "kernel" line, so go to the end of that line.
3. Add the following all_generic_ide=1
4. Press the "b" key to boot with the changes.

This change is temporary and will disappear when you reboot so if it doesn't work then reboot, no harm, no foul.

If it does work you can simply go in to /etc/boot/grub/ and edit the .conf file by adding the text to the kernel line. I'd recommend only adding it to the non recovery lines so you can use them as a fail safe if for some reason this stops working. Also as a side note, when you upgrade your kernel with apt it will prompt you to either accept the package maintainers version, compare the two, or do a three way merge. I just accept the maintainers version and then edit the line again because I don't trust the system to intelligently combine the two files.

Lastly, my system is entirely ide (PATA) drives (HD and two burners - see the k3berror.txt attachment for more info), so I'm not sure how this would work if you have SATA drives installed. IMHO this problem goes further then a bad version of wodim, I started having problems when libata was upgraded to start automatically using SATA designations (i.e. sda instead of hda) for all drives regardless of type, I think there is something funny about the way they emulate the IDE controls through the SATA interface (if that makes any sense).