Hang up on boot

I have been having an issue with a pata hd which seems to sometimes works. But when it doesn't work I get repeat failure notices for about 2 minutes while booting up. I didn't set up the drive to mount automatically. I keep win xp on it just in case and don't really care about getting to it,
Is there a way to limit the failure notices or even have it completely ignore the drive?

thanks for help!