Comment 6 for bug 1073688

Same problem, or similar enough to likely have the same cause:

Total system freeze when unplugging an expresscard (sata_sil24). No mouse, no keyboard, no error. Screen remains visible, but doesn't update. Needs hard reset.

I had an eSATA drive connected through the Expresscard eSATA adapter. Unmounted the drive, powered down drive enclosure, disconnected esata cable, then finally removed the expresscard. The logs (syslog and kern.log) only show:

Dec 9 13:04:48 x200s kernel: [186036.733409] ata5: exception Emask 0x10 SAct 0x0 SErr 0x80000 action 0xe frozen
Dec 9 13:04:48 x200s kernel: [186036.733420] ata5: irq_stat 0x00100010, PHY RDY changed
Dec 9 13:04:48 x200s kernel: [186036.733428] ata5: SError: { 10B8B }
Dec 9 13:04:48 x200s kernel: [186036.733439] ata5: hard resetting link
Dec 9 13:04:50 x200s kernel: [186038.812104] ata5: SATA link down (SStatus 0 SControl 0)

Nothing else. Next line is the normal boot message after the hard reset: "kernel: imklog 5.8.6, log source = /proc/kmsg started."

$ uname -a
Linux x200s 3.2.0-34-generic #53-Ubuntu SMP Thu Nov 15 10:48:16 UTC 2012 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux