A non-system hard drive went bad in my dual-boot XP Pro/Debian pc.
I had to unplug it because it kept making "clunking" noises, and
caused XP to seize up and reboot.
My machine boots into XP ok, but when I boot into Linux it spends
a very long time trying to communicate with the missing drive, and
displays these messages a few times, before it gives up and continues
to boot:
ide: failed opcode was: unknown
hdh: dma_timer_expiry: dma status == 0x41
hdh: DMA timeout error
hdh: dma timeout error: status=0x58 { DriveReady SeekComplete DataRequest }
I have commented out the entry for this drive in /etc/fstab. Is there
something else I need to change to stop it from trying to communicate
with the missing drive?