Bug 12962 (failboot-gigabyte)

Ubuntu  8.10 kernel (2.6.27) succeeds booting but only on hpet=disable

Self-compiled kernels up to 2.6.28.2 succeed to boot  on ubuntu 8.04 (no initrd)

Anything higher (2.6.28.3+ on Ubuntu 8.10) fails to boot with messages about not being able to find the hard disk, and drops to a prompt (evidently the hard disk was found but appears in /sys as an error instead of /dev)

2.6.29 on Ubuntu 8.10 fails to boot, and lists the disks that the ATA system found (includes hard disk) but gets to a kernel panic because it cannot find (0,0) or the sda device node. 

Ubuntu 9.04 kernel (2.6.28.8 based) fails to boot, dropping to busybox prompt, even with acpi=off, nolapic, noapic, hpet=disable, edd=on, "verbose" replacing "splash silent" options.  and on expert mode, the messages when finding an ext3 filesystem loop over and over before it gets to busybox.

Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-MA69VM-S2, SATA300 jumper on Maxtor disk removed.

AMD Athlon X2 4800+ 2.5GHz virtualisation enabled
2 GB DDR800 RAM

Cheers!