Non-deterministic boot failures; "error attempt to read or write outside of disk 'hd0'"

[Jeremy Lakeman]

I have a slightly old SSD and recently replaced my MB. Clearly my bios is
trying to talk to the SSD using a more recent sata version.

Linux was encountering errors and resetting the sata port link speed, until
I added a libata.force=1.5 boot argument.

Then I started noticing boot failures; "error attempt to read or write
outside of disk 'hd0'".

Most likely to occur while running initrd, but also sometimes during the
linux command or while loading grub itself. But a couple more reboot
attempts and the system will start just fine and continue to run without
any other issues.

As a work around I've patched grub.d/10_linux to wrap both the linux and
initrd commands in a retry loop like;

until [cmd]; do echo 'retrying'; done

Or course, since the boot process still encounters an error, I have to
press a key to continue. But that is much less annoying than rebooting
until I get lucky with every read operation.

At some point I'll try upgrading the MB firmware, but I'm doubtful that
will change anything.

Does anyone have any other suggestions? Apart from booting from another
drive?