I get hard drive errors containing 'task_no_data_intr' when my system boots up. What could be the cause of this?

After the bootup of a system the following error messages appear in the /var/log/dmesg boot log file:

hda: task_no_data_intr: status=0x51 { DriveReady SeekComplete Error }
hda: task_no_data_intr: error=0x04 { DriveStatusError }

The important part of the output above is task_no_data_intr. Essentially, these error messages are harmless to ...