Comment 3 for bug 179336

Very interesting. I've see similar problems and perhaps that I can help finding where is the problem

Floppy disk : Do you have a floppy disk reader in your computer? If no, can you access your BIOS and look if there's any floppy disk activated somewhere in the BIOS. If the BIOS tells ubuntu that there's a floppy disk reader when it's not the case, it already happened that ubuntu won't boot, waiting for the Floppy disk to react.

Master Drives : Make sure you didn't put two harddrive configured as Master on the same IDE cable. If you have two drives on the same IDE cable, the hard drive at the end of the cable must be the master and the other must be the slave.

SATA Controller : Some Intel SATA controllers ( and maybe some others ) act like if they are IDE controllers in order to make Windows XP work without crashing ( it's pretty hard to make Windows really works on SATA controllers... ) but this gives a problem to Linux which works very great both with IDE and SATA controllers because this strange behavior seems to be adapted for Windows only. My own computer is a Dell vostro and ubuntu did have the same behavior, detecting my drives as SATA and not IDE and crashing half of the time at boot. Normally, you can change the controller mode in BIOS and set it to "SATA" or "RAID" rather than "IDE" and it should fix your issue.

If one of the 3 solutions did work for you, can you tell it here as we can gather more information about your hardware and contribute to already opened bug report?

Thanks for your contribution to ubuntu!