I cannot boot the LiveCD of Ubuntu 9.10 on my desktop system. The disk works fine on my laptop, and on my desktop at the office. When I installed 8.04 on my desktop, there was a problem with the installation failing, and winding up on a screen with a prompt for busybox/initramfs. The thread exploring this issue talked a bit about problems with support for some SATA chipsets, the Marvell being among them. The system now books 8.04 without problems, since including "irqpoll" to the boot options.

Now I am looking at chasing down what seems to be an issue with low-level drivers on my mobo. The mobo is an Intel D975XBX2, and has several SATA HDDs and a SATA DVD R/W attached. When I enable printout of the boot procedure, booting from the 9.10 LiveCD hangs with alternating messages of "ata6: link slow to respond" and "ata6: SRST failed". This seems awfully suspicious for another problem with the SATA chipset.

Is anyone else having problems with this motherboard? Does anyone have a list of boot options that might help?