Ubuntu 7.04/Issues/USB-SATA race condition causes hang

From DellLinuxWiki

Description: USB device misreads interrupts intermittently due to race condition with ATA driver.
Systems Affected: Dimension 530n.
Impact: Systems hangs during boot up.
Workaround: Force SATA driver to load before USB driver. Create a script named load_ata_piix in /usr/share/initramfs-tools/scripts/init-top/ with the following contents:

 #!/bin/sh
 PREREQ=""
 prereqs()
 {
        echo "$PREREQ"
 }
 case $1 in
 # get pre-requisites
 prereqs)
        prereqs
        exit 0
        ;;
 esac
 modprobe -Qb ata_piix

Execute the script:

$ sudo /usr/share/initramfs-tools/scripts/init-top/load_ata_piix

Next, rebuild the initrd so that the kernel will probe for the SATA driver before the USB driver:

$ sudo update-initramfs -u -k all