Comment 42 for bug 220706

Upgraded my Pioneer DVR-215D to latest Firmware (version 1.18) as 'multics' did, and updated my motherboard BIOS.
That removed the errors on the SATA channel which had the Pioneer attached to it.
But I still got errors on sata ports that didn't have any drives attached to them!

Error message (below) will be sent out three or four times and after 30 seconds or so in initramfs, linux-image-2.6.27-7 will give up and continue booting.

 3968 Oct 30 22:17:26 quad kernel: [ 65.528185] sda:<3>ata3.00: exception Emask 0x0 SAct 0x0 SErr 0x0 action 0x6 frozen
 3969 Oct 30 22:17:26 quad kernel: [ 95.524159] ata3.00: cmd c8/00:08:00:00:00/00:00:00:00:00/e0 tag 0 dma 4096 in
 3970 Oct 30 22:17:26 quad kernel: [ 95.524160] res 40/00:00:00:00:00/00:00:00:00:00/00 Emask 0x4 (timeout)
 3971 Oct 30 22:17:26 quad kernel: [ 95.524451] ata3.00: status: { DRDY }
 3972 Oct 30 22:17:26 quad kernel: [ 95.524550] ata3: hard resetting link
 3973 Oct 30 22:17:26 quad kernel: [ 96.000096] ata3: SATA link up 1.5 Gbps (SStatus 113 SControl 300)
 3974 Oct 30 22:17:26 quad kernel: [ 96.024206] ata3.00: configured for UDMA/133
 3975 Oct 30 22:17:26 quad kernel: [ 96.024315] ata3: EH complete

I turned off all my unused sata ports in BIOS, by changing 'Extended IDE Drive' to none.
[ Marked in red on monitor in my attached pictures. ]

With this BIOS fix, my machine will boot without any sata/ide errors. :-)