Alan Cox wrote:
On Tue, Oct 17, 2006 at 06:55:29PM -0400, Dave Jones wrote:
  
Most noticable so far:
- There seems to be some oddness in SATA (ata_piix only maybe?) with timeouts.
    

The 2.6.18 code has some problems with ATAPI devices, I've also seen lots
of problems here.

  
Confirming that :

ata2: SRST failed (status 0xFF)
ata2: SRST failed (err_mask=0x100)
ata2: softreset failed, retrying in 5 secs

Found this thread on it : http://lkml.org/lkml/2006/9/30/87