Comment 11 for bug 23374

Okay, upon further research, the parameters required to boot are 'nolapic
pci=noacpi'.

Unfortunately, the delay I mentioned earlier was actually the sata_uli driver
timing out while trying to talk to the hard drive.. I was able to glean this
info from dmesg, when the driver was modprobed:

PCI: enabling device 0000:00:1f.1
sata_uli: 0000:00:1f.1: version 0.5
ata1: SATA Max UDMA/133 cmd 0xfd00 ctl FC02 bmdma 0xf900 irq 11
ata1: SATA link up 1.5Gbps (SStatus 113)
ata1: slow completion (cmd ec)
ata1: dev 0 cfg 49:0000 82:0000 83:0000 84:0000 85:0000 86:0000 87:0000 88:0000
ata1: no dma
ata1: dev 0 not supported, ignoring

subsequent attempts to modprobe -r sata_uli and modprobe sata_uli provide a
similar message, except with these two lines:

ata1: SATA linkup 1.5 Gbps (SStatus 113)
ata1 is slow to respond, please be patient.
ata1 failed to respond (30 secs)