Comment 30 for bug 198871

Similar bug on my PC.

HW:
-Asus P5K Motherboard with Intel P35 chipset (ICH9) and onboard JMicron SATA controller.
-Seagate Barracuda (SATA, 250GB), originally plugged to the JMICRON SATA.
-Optiarc DVD-ROM (SATA)
(-Seagate Barracuda (SATA, 160), but was unplugged all the time)

SW:
-Latest BIOS (can check the version num. if needed)
-ICH9 is set to IDE (no other options), JMicron is set to Enabled, AHCI
-Ubuntu 8.10 (downloaded a standart CD the second day it was released)

Prob:
I booted to LiveCD and started the installation. When the installation process gets to file copying, i get a #5 IO error (Can't copy files to HDD)

Then I plugged the HDD to ICH9 SATA port, and set JMICRON to Enabled, IDE.
The installation was smooth (although the partition wizard was working very slowly both this time and the previous try).
After rebooting, I booted Ubuntu as usual, but I got an error message, that it can't login as root.
The only thing availible was busybox. Then it gets stuck at initramfs with "ata2: COMRESET failed" error. Booting in safemode didn't make any difference.

My solution:
I connected the HDD back to JMicron controller and switched it to AHCI mode. After that it worked just fine. I tried switching JMicron to IDE, but it still works.