ata device crashing system in Fedora 8

Lately, my system has been crashing, fairly religiously.  I thought this was due to a VMware installation I did about the same time, and I opened a question to that effect, but now I have reason to believe otherwise.  My system is Fedora 8 x64 running kernel 2.6.23.14-107.fc8.  

Here's the last bit of my syslog (theoretically when the system crashed).

Jan 30 22:18:58 localhost kernel: ata5: EH complete
Jan 30 22:19:08 localhost kernel: ata5.01: exception Emask 0x0 SAct 0x0 SErr 0x0 action 0x2 frozen
Jan 30 22:19:08 localhost kernel: ata5.01: cmd a0/00:00:00:00:20/00:00:00:00:00/b0 tag 0 cdb 0x1e data 0
Jan 30 22:19:08 localhost kernel:          res 40/00:03:00:00:20/00:00:00:00:00/b0 Emask 0x4 (timeout)
Jan 30 22:19:08 localhost kernel: ata5: soft resetting port
Jan 30 22:19:09 localhost kernel: ata5.01: configured for PIO0
Jan 30 22:19:09 localhost kernel: ata5: EH complete
Jan 30 22:19:19 localhost kernel: ata5.01: exception Emask 0x0 SAct 0x0 SErr 0x0 action 0x2 frozen
Jan 30 22:19:19 localhost kernel: ata5.01: cmd a0/00:00:00:00:20/00:00:00:00:00/b0 tag 0 cdb 0x1e data 0
Jan 30 22:19:19 localhost kernel:          res 40/00:03:00:00:20/00:00:00:00:00/b0 Emask 0x4 (timeout)
Jan 30 22:19:19 localhost kernel: ata5: soft resetting port
Jan 30 22:19:20 localhost kernel: ata5.01: configured for PIO0
Jan 30 22:19:20 localhost kernel: ata5: EH complete
Jan 30 22:19:20 localhost kernel: sr 4:0:1:0: ioctl_internal_command return code = 8000002
Jan 30 22:19:20 localhost kernel:    : Sense Key : Aborted Command [current] [descriptor]
Jan 30 22:19:20 localhost kernel:    : Add. Sense: No additional sense information
Jan 30 22:21:38 localhost rsyslogd: [origin software="rsyslogd" swVersion="1.19.11" x-pid="2301"][x-configInfo udpReception="No" udpPort="514" tcpReception="No" tcpPort="0"] restart

The first part, with the ata EH complete stuff repeats like six times before what I've shown.  I think it's SCSI, either the CD or HD, but this is out of my expertise.  Thanks for any help you might have on this.