I'm completely not cool enough to figure out how to quote, but the user above who mentioned faulty memory as a problem? I read one of the next posts where I figured, "bah! memory, there's no way!"  But on a whim I pulled the last two sticks of memory from my machine, and it loaded right up.   Dead on.  I swear to God.  No all_generic_ide required.  I've spent a week of evenings fiddling with this.  The good news is I really know 'all_generic_ide irapoll pci=nomsi' and all that now... probably going to be handy some day.  But not today.  Bad memory.  I had exactly the symptoms to bring me to this post, btw.  Cheers.