Ubuntu 11.10 install failure, can't access SATA disk (VIA VT6420)

[Chris Green]

I have a problem trying to install Ubuntu 11.10.

Originally I had Ubuntu 10.04 installed and that ran fine until the
latest kernel upgrade from 2.6.32 to 2.6.35.  I then found that if I
selected the old (2.6.32) kernel from GRUB at startup the system still
booted and ran OK but selecting the default (2.6.35) kernel the system
failed to boot.  Trying recovery mode with the 2.6.35 kernel produced
lots of SATA timeout errors and then a kernel panic.

So I decided to do a complete clean install of Ubuntu 11.10, that fails
with a disk I/O error:-

    "input/output error during write on /dev/sda"

I have tried both 32-bit and 64-bit versions of 11.10 and both do
exactly the same thing.

Installing ubuntu 10.04 from my original CD (which has an even older
kernel of course) works perfectly, no problems at all.

So it looks as if kernels from 2.6.35 onwards have a problem with my VIA
VT6420 SATA hardware.  However I can't find anything very specific
searching with Google.

Has anyone got any ideas what I can do to fix this?

-- 
Chris Green