Comment 43 for bug 47768

This thread on the forums seems related (29 pages long):
  http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=765195

Near the end of the thread the suggested work around becomes 'use Fedora 10', so it seems like something that needs to be dealt with.

I was stung with a very similar issue with Hardy, and through my advocacy I've had several non-technical friends who decided to take a look at linux and nearly turned back because of this issue in Hardy and Intrepid.

In my little group it seems that changing the BIOS SATA settings from IDE to RAID seems to be the top fix, followed by adding all_generic_ide to the kernel options. Looking at the forum post there seems to be 4 or 5 different things that might be needed as workarounds, which may suggest several bugs with the same symptoms.