Buffer I/O error at boot up: harmless or?

[sean finney]

hi folks,

i've been playing more with my 2950, and after some trials and
tribulations have things pretty happily set up with ubuntu dapper.
however, i've been seeing the following error message from my
kernel at start up (within the initrd, before / is mounted):

[   97.924486] Buffer I/O error on device sda2, logical block 568973952

sda through sdd are 4 physical disks, which appear along with the RAID 5
logical disk (sde) set up on my PERC 5/i (megaraid_sas) controller.  3
of the disks define the logical disk, the fourth is a hot space.

sde is partitioned with a /boot on sde1, and a big lvm partition
covering the rest on sde2.

my *guess* is that the first blocks on sda are the same as the first
blocks on sde, and thus sda has a funky partition table which confuses
the kernel (which arguably shouldn't see the physical drives at all, so
thus i think this is a kernel bug in ubuntu).

as a little experiment, i popped out sda and let the RAID sync onto the
hot spare (sdd).  after that was done i popped sda back in and rebooted
the system.  now, i get:

[   97.924486] Buffer I/O error on device sda2, logical block 568973952
[   97.924692] Buffer I/O error on device sdd2, logical block 568973952

which would support my hypothesis.  anyone more familiar with the
idiosyncrasies of megaraid_sas care to comment?


thanks,
	sean
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