After upgrading to 3.1.0 from 3.0.12, none of my VMs will boot using SATA. All four guests are CentOS 5, running on a RHEL 5 AMD host. Three are 64 bit guests, one is 32 bit. IO APIC, PAE/NX, AMD-V and Nested Paging are enabled.
There seem to be a couple of threads on the forums of other users experiencing the same behaviour after upgrading:
http://forums.virtualbox.org/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=25421
and
http://forums.virtualbox.org/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=25568
The error on boot is:
ata1.00: NCQ disabled due to excessive errors
ata1.00: exception Emask 0x0 SAct 0x1 SErr 0x0 action 0x6 frozen
...
ata1.00: status: { DRDY }
All of the guests are using Raw Disk access, with LVM running on the host system. For the time being I've switched them all to IDE and this gets around the issue. Attaching VBox log and screenshot from one of the affected guests.