how to disable the searching for nonexist partitions

Hi,

I have a dual OS installed in one hard disk, with dev/sda1 & dev/sda2
for windows XP, and dev/sda5, dev/sda6, dev/sda7 for Redhat. But
everytime I started the redhat, the system automatically searches all
the hard disk partitions, and would give me some error message as:

ata3: port failed to respond (30 secs)
ata3: SRST failed (status 0xFF)
ata3: SRST failed (err_mask=0x100)
ata3: SRST failed (status 0xFF)
ata3: SRST failed (err_mask=0x100)
ata3: reset failed, giving up
ata4: port failed to respond (30 secs)
ata4: SRST failed (status 0xFF)
ata4: SRST failed (err_mask=0x100)
ata4: SRST failed (status 0xFF)
ata4: SRST failed (err_mask=0x100)
ata4: reset failed, giving up

My guess is that since I don't have dev/sda3 and dev/sda4, the search
for 3&4 would always give the error message. So is there any way I can
stop this searching at this point? Thanks very much!

.