4.9: ata1-slave glitch causes hangs on rebooting

[Jeff Mitchell]

Hey, Stable list--

I'm running 4.8 new install CVSup/make buildworld/buildkernel/etc. upped to the latest 4.9 sources as of about a week ago.  I have a problem that pops up with nearly every reboot of my machine (Dell Inspiron 7500).

When the system is booting, I get a line (that I gather is fairly common) that says "ata1-slave: ATAPI identify retries exceeded".  Unfortunately my computer most often decides to freeze (in the "I must turn the power off and back on" sense) before this line is displayed:

sio0 at port 0x3f8-0x3ff irq 4 flags 0x10 on isa0
sio0: type 16550A
sio1: configured irq 3 not in bitmap of probed irqs 0
*** FREEZE POINT ***
ata1-slave: ATAPI identify retries exceeded
pccard: card inserted, slot 1
pccard: card removed, slot 1

Turning the power off and on *always* causes the computer to get past the freeze point and boot fully.  I've tried adding and removing various devices from my kernel (at first I thought adding device pcm caused the problem, but removing it did not help...I removed the parallel port devices, which used to be initialized after the serial port devices, but that obviously did not help either since it now simply freezes after the serial devices).  I don't know if it's somehow related to the pccard lines that follow it, since I'm certainly not inserting and removing devices as I boot up, but I figure that's likely just the slot initializing.

If anyone has any thoughts or suggestions I'd appreciate it.

Also, one more issue.  I'm running Gnome 2.4 with GDM.  I can hit Reboot at the login screen and reboot just fine, but hitting Shut Down doesn't shut down the computer.  Instead, X seems to quit, then get restarted, and then the screen goes blank (except that my display, while blank, is flickering very slightly).  Pressing a bunch of Ctrl-Cs and Ctrl-Xs and Ctrl-Alt-Deletes gets it to reboot, but I'm not sure what's going on here.  When this happens I cannot get to the console by Ctrl-Alt-F1 so I can't see what's happening.  Any ideas, anyone?

Thanks,
Jeff