Comment 20 for bug 222176

I'm having the same problems with a Dell Vostro 200 (Core 2 Duo 2.2GHz).

LiveCD x86 drops to busybox
LiveCD 64 drops to busybox
Alternate CD x86 install fine, restart drops to busybox

The "all_generic"ide" option for grub make things work.

This system has SATA disk and SATA DVD - no PATA/IDE at all. No floppy either, although it does have media reader for memory cards etc.

I don't know any way to capture the boot-time messages when we get to busybox. I have other hardware here (Macs mostly) but not much experience with Linux internals such as these. If someone can point me the way to save messages I'd be happy to get them and add to here.

There is one message in the failure that also appears in the success, so I have it. It happens just before the "unhappy" messages in the failure case, so I suspect it may be significant. It says
[ 64.530772] Driver 'sd' needs updating - please use bus_type methods
There's also one in the success case a few lines further down that says
sda: <4>Driver 'sr' needs updating - please use bus_type methods

In the failure case, the SATA drive is being handled as ATA/IDE and various speeds are attempted. It starts as 133, then tries 100, 66 and finally 33.