Comment 65 for bug 626622

I was having this issue on an HP Z800 workstation. Specifically, the Lucid kernel worked fine, but Maverick or Natty would crash (cause a reboot) very quickly after making the grub menu selection.

Same symptom with the Natty Live CD.

acpi=off or nolapic allowed a normal boot. pci=nomsi did not, although with that, there was a hang rather than a reboot.

I also tried the "intel-microcode" fix described by nanobyte above, but that did not work for me.

Turns out I was running a very out-of-date BIOS. Everything is fine after flashing to the latest.