I apologize for not having the full warning/error, I tried a few times to take a pic but my timing is off.
when i enable ahci i get this behavior after install. i cant find anything about a solution... its adding 10-12 seconds. turning off ahci only saves a couple seconds but then the whole system is slower.
i have tried both platter and ssd drives, internal and external. Interestingly this only happens with ubuntu based distros but doesn't happen when booting from installer images for ANY distro.
The laptop is an ANCIENT lenovo L420 (blaze it) and I have tried Elementary os, Pop!, Ubuntu, and Zorin. All of them do it. I haven't tried debian, but I have tried Fedora, Arch which do not do this.
Other than changing AHCI settings, what do I do? Please hwlp!
You should check if there is any firmware update for the ancient Lenovo. That may be the solution.
Or you might have some luck with the grub parameter libata.force=noncq in order to disable AHCI ATA NCQ
sudo nano /etc/default/grub
Change the line GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash" to GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash libata.force=noncq"
tap ctrl+o to overwrite, then enter to save current configuration. Tap ctrl+x to exit the editor.
Now, you must run
sudo update-grub
in order for the changes to take effect. Reboot and test...