Failed to issue COM RESET successfully after 3 attempts. Failing...

Question

Just in case anyone else has this problem, and wants to claw their eyes out.
I upgraded the Hard Disk in my MacBook Pro about four days ago (the new MBP, summer 2009 with SD card). I installed a Hitachi Travelstar 7K320. It worked awesome for about four days, until I went to run the EFI Firmware Update this morning.
My machine stopped booting. I held Command-V to get the verbose boot output, and eventually got the message: Failed to issue COM RESET successfully after 3 attempts. Failing... - which is where the boot halted.
I removed the Hitachi and restored the stock drive, and the laptop now booted fine. I think it's something Apple will have to look into.

Answer 1

I believe posting relevant facts is productive, & a very relevant fact here is that you are trying to use a drive with an interface (SATA-II) that Apple does not currently support in its laptops.
SATA-I controllers are supposed to be compatible with SATA-II drives, but many of them are not. The problem is how some controllers implement auto negotiation, which is supposed to tell the drive to fall back to SATA-1 speeds with the slower controllers. Some SATA-II drives have a jumper to force the slower speed if auto negotiation doesn't work; some do not.
How this compatibility problem came about, & why the jumper is required, is complicated but the short version is that at least four different specification bodies had some responsibility in producing SATA specifications, & not all controllers were designed to the same standards. This includes not just the controllers Apple has been using but those in many PC's as well.
So I agree that Apple dropped the ball, but not necessarily the way you might think: it should have made it very clear that the firmware update implemented an unsupported interface speed, that it might cause problems, & (most importantly) provided a reversion strategy to the former firmware if it did.
Hopefully, Apple will take another 'swing' at this & either provide that reversion strategy or a new update that at least allows the controller to work more reliably with the faster interface. But until then, unless your drive has the jumper, my previous suggestion is probably the best you can do.
BTW, none of the current mechanical drives available for laptops can saturate a SATA-1 bus except for brief bursts from the drive's buffer, so the real loss in performance of running a single SATA-II drive at SATA-1 speeds is almost negligible, something you might notice in a benchmark but not in real-world use.