Yeah. We spent hours on that, poring over bugs 38688 and 116996 trying to figure out what was stealing the memory addresses that by rights belonged to the SATA disk. And actually, I think there was a genuine bug with ide-disk stealing addresses from ata_piix, just like pnpacpi does in bug 38688 (38688 is a helpful bug for working with help one of my disks is missing
confirmation). But it wasn’t the boot that blacklisted ide-disk that fixed the problem, it was the one two after that, after we tried switching the working DVD burner with the hard drive, and then moved the hard drive to a new slot.
I swore to myself while this was going on that it was not going to be A Learning Experience, as in I was not going to be all well, I did spend six hours in the depths of despair, but that’s OK, I learned something.
But actually I do feel good for knowing more about the kernel now. GRRR.