hdc: Drive not ready for command

[Matt]

Hello,

 I am running an up-to-date copy of Ubuntu 8.04 on an IBM Thinkpad R30.
The issue I'm having is the boot up and running of the OS is very slow
and the hard drive light on the laptop goes solid during the Ubuntu
start up and stays solid after that, even without any actual hard drive
activity going on. I switched over to another terminal during boot and I
see the follow line intercut with the regular start up messages multiple
times:

hdc: drive not ready for command

Also, once I log into the desktop, there is a blank disc showing on the
desktop when there is no disk in the cd-rom tray. The strange thing is,
that this doesn't happen EVERY time I boot up, just most of the time. I
thought I had fixed it by booting with a disc in the drive but today I
tried it again and it didn't make a difference. 
 I've had Open Suse and Windows XP on this machine and hadn't
experienced any similar problems before this. I've seen a few different
bug reports that seem to have some of the issues I'm experiencing, but
not all at once.

Any idea anyone?

Thanks,

Matt Rauch