Comment 33 for bug 190492

I was one of the original posters of this bug. When I installed Intrepid (by dist-upgrade) on my AMD64 machine, I was delighted to discover that the problem went away. My SATA DVD-RW drive is now completely and smoothly supported.

The pci=nomsi option turns off a type of memory access used primarily by PCI-express cards. For some reason I do not completely understand, using the msi-type memory access conflicts with kernel recognition of SATA drives, for kernels between 2.6.16 (I think) and 2.6.27. Using the pci=nomsi switch is completely safe and harmless.

However, this bug seems to be fixed in the 2.6.27 kernel. Since you upgraded your installation in-place, you may not have this kernel active on your computer. Check the results of 'uname -r' to see which kernel you are using. I had the 2.6.27 kernel "kept back" when I did my upgrade, because I had customized /boot/grub/menu.lst, and I wanted to keep the customization. If you find that you don't have the 2.6.27 kernel active, try running "sudo update-grub," and make sure to choose the "package maintainer's version" when prompted. This will overwrite your /boot/grub/menu.lst, so you might want to back it up first (you will lose your customizations). If this doesn't get your 2.6.27 kernel installed, or if you already have it, I do not have further suggestions (I'm still pretty new at this...). But you should be able to find help in the Ubuntu Forums.