Hard wait on optical drive status

[Geoffrey Leach]

My laptop (ASUS Z84F, FC6) has an optical drive that is (alledegedly)  
configured as a SATA device. Every half hour or so, HAL checks the  
drive and it does not answer (log below). I "blame" HAL because  
stopping it makes the problem go away, but that's not a long-term  
solution, of course. I'm assuming that the drive configuration is wierd  
and thus unexpected. Does anyone care to speculate on what the problem  
might be?


kernel: ata2.01: exception Emask 0x0 SAct 0x0 SErr 0x0 action 0x2 frozen
kernel: ata2.01: (BMDMA stat 0x64)
kernel: ata2.01: tag 0 cmd 0xa0 Emask 0x4 stat 0x40 err 0x0 (timeout)
kernel: ata2: port is slow to respond, please be patient (Status 0xd0)
kernel: ata2: port failed to respond (30 secs, Status 0xd0)
kernel: ata2: soft resetting port
kernel: ata2.00: configured for UDMA/100
kernel: ata2.01: configured for UDMA/25
kernel: ata2: EH complete