I have a lenovo z 480 and half of the time ubuntu will not boot, only displays this error message
Error ata1.00: failed to enable AA (error_mask = 0x1
and sometimes the screen goes black with blinking cursor. I've tried several distros (kde and gnome and always equals the start and end times others do not. All use the grub 2, the only distro that starts 100% all the time is mageia not if using the old grub but it is very annoying not to be able to use the distro that you like best.
Best Answer
The hard drive incorrectly advertises the ATA_FLAG_FPDMA_AA flag (the FPDMA FIS Auto Activate bit) but when this is activated it does not seem to have this capability. See http://download.intel.com/support/chipsets/imsm/sb/sata2_ncq_overview.pdf
Generally, the best fix is for drivers/ata/libata-core.c to be quirked to fix this for the specific drive series. A workaround may be do disable NCQ using the kernel parameter libata.force=noncq but this will make performance suck.
To do this, edit /etc/default/grub
and change:
to:
and run: