Comment 72 for bug 220706

I encountered the same issue when I originally upgraded from 8.04 to 8.10. When I first upgraded to 8.10, I started seeing the "ata5: SRST failed (error = -16) " error. I'd see the error multiple times and then the boot process would drop to the BusyBox shell. At this point I could exit the shell and the boot process would successfully load the OS and window manager (kubuntu), but the DVD would not mount. At the time I thought it was a problem with the upgrade so I decided to do a fresh install of 8.10. The fresh install failed with the same issue, except this time it would not continue on the exit from BusyBox and so I re-installed 8.04. I've tried various fixes found in the forums and launchpad (BIOS changes, root delay, _all_generic_ide in grub boot, and others I can't remember), but nothing has worked for me. I reinstalled 8.04 and decided to wait for 9.04, but the same error is still appearing with the latest release. My latest attempt was to replace my IDE HD with a SATA HD as I had read that others had attributed the problem to a IDE and SATA combination between HD and DVD.
Here's what I'm running:
Motherboard: EVGA nForce 680i LT SLI
CPU: Intel Core 2 Duo E6600 2.4 GHz
Graphics: NVIDIA eForce 7600
Hard Drive: Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 500GB IDE
DVD: LG SuperMulti GSA-H62N SATA DVD Writer