Get some hardware related errors logged into dmesg:

oem@dub:~$ dmesg | grep ata10
[    1.007989] ata10: PATA max UDMA/133 cmd 0xa800 ctl 0xa480 bmdma 0xa408 irq 18
[    1.691664] ata10: prereset failed (errno=-19)
[    1.691670] ata10: reset failed, giving up

oem@dub:~$ dmesg | grep ata2
[    0.990290] ata2: SATA max UDMA/133 abar m1024@0xfebfb800 port 0xfebfb980 irq 45
[    1.688011] ata2: SATA link up 3.0 Gbps (SStatus 123 SControl 300)
[    1.688055] ata2.00: unsupported device, disabling
[    1.688057] ata2.00: disabled

As I understand, its related to my old Seagate SATA HDD, and the PATA CDROM. These errors are quite new, so I feel that their settings (dma, write-cache, ...) have been modified by some upgrades.

I've already used hdparm to set write-cache off on the HDDs. But it seems like I need to review some other setting(s) too. With oldest distro it was easy to know about the hardware settings, but now on Quantal/Precise its deeply hidden for the average user. So i would like to know how to view/modify these settings.

About the CDROM reader, the problem is different: - the system don't identify it with an UUID; but only with ATAPI or by-id

oem@dub:~$ dmesg|grep 'ATAPI'
[    1.308611] ata3.00: ATAPI: TSSTcorp CDDVDW SH-S203D, SB00, max UDMA/100

oem@dub:~$ ls -l /dev/disk/by-id/
......
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root  9 oct.   1 06:42 ata-TSSTcorp_CDDVDW_SH-S203D -> ../../sr0
.....