From the excerpt from the boot log attached below, the bug seems to be that YaST (or whatever other program) has generated a boot sequence whereby the SATA driver isn't loaded till after the SB read is attempted. Once
I'm going to try to fix the problem described below by reinstalling with all 4 drives present; if it's a bug, the bug report goes as follows: I installed SuSE 9.3 on a degraded mirror (SCSI) on a Tyan S2882. Then, I added another identical SCSI drive sdb (so far unused) and 2 SATA drives sdc and sdd. On the SATA drives, I made a mirrored XFS filesystem. During boot, SB read of the XFS filesystem fails. the system has booted, I am able to use the XFS filesystem with the command mdadm -As /dev/md1; mount /dev/md1 /xfs My mdadm.conf file looks like so: # cat /etc/mdadm.conf DEVICE /dev/sdc1 /dev/sdd1 ARRAY /dev/md1 level=raid1 num-devices=2 UUID=4cc9811c:cf7ec5fc:65de479d:972790be devices=/dev/sdc1,/dev/sdd1 <6>md: Autodetecting RAID arrays. <6>md: autorun ... <6>md: considering sda2 ... <6>md: adding sda2 ... <6>md: created md0 <6>md: bind<sda2> <6>md: running: <sda2> <6>raid1: raid set md0 active with 1 out of 2 mirrors <6>md: ... autorun DONE. <5>ReiserFS: md0: found reiserfs format "3.6" with standard journal <5>ReiserFS: md0: using ordered data mode <4>reiserfs: using flush barriers <5>ReiserFS: md0: journal params: device md0, size 8192, journal first block 18, max trans len 1024, max batch 900, max commit age 30, max trans age 30 <5>ReiserFS: md0: checking transaction log (md0) <5>ReiserFS: md0: Using r5 hash to sort names <4>md: raidstart(pid 2095) used deprecated START_ARRAY ioctl. This will not be supported beyond 2.6 <3>md: could not bd_claim sda2. <4>md: autostart failed! <4>md: raidstart(pid 2095) used deprecated START_ARRAY ioctl. This will not be supported beyond 2.6 <3>md: could not open unknown-block(8,33). <4>md: autostart failed! <6>md: Autodetecting RAID arrays. <6>md: autorun ... <6>md: ... autorun DONE. <6>device-mapper: 4.4.0-ioctl (2005-01-12) initialised: dm-devel@redhat.com <6>parport0: PC-style at 0x378 [PCSPP] <6>parport0: irq 7 detected <6>lp0: using parport0 (polling). <4>XFS: SB read failed <6>hw_random: AMD768 system management I/O registers at 0x1000. <6>hw_random hardware driver 1.0.0 loaded <6>tg3.c:v3.23 (February 15, 2005) <6>ACPI: PCI interrupt 0000:02:09.0[A] -> GSI 24 (level, low) -> IRQ 169 <6>eth0: Tigon3 [partno(BCM95704A7) rev 2003 PHY(5704)] (PCIX:100MHz:64-bit) 10/100/1000BaseT Ethernet 00:e0:81:28:c7:b8 <6>eth0: RXcsums[1] LinkChgREG[0] MIirq[0] ASF[0] Split[0] WireSpeed[1] TSOcap[1] <6>ACPI: PCI interrupt 0000:02:09.1[B] -> GSI 25 (level, low) -> IRQ 177 <6>eth1: Tigon3 [partno(BCM95704A7) rev 2003 PHY(5704)] (PCIX:100MHz:64-bit) 10/100/1000BaseT Ethernet 00:e0:81:28:c7:b9 <6>eth1: RXcsums[1] LinkChgREG[0] MIirq[0] ASF[0] Split[0] WireSpeed[1] TSOcap[1] <6>ACPI: PCI interrupt 0000:03:04.0[A] -> GSI 16 (level, low) -> IRQ 185 <7>libata version 1.10 loaded. <7>sata_sil version 0.9 <6>ACPI: PCI interrupt 0000:03:05.0[A] -> GSI 19 (level, low) -> IRQ 193 <6>ata1: SATA max UDMA/100 cmd 0xFFFFC2000002AC80 ctl 0xFFFFC2000002AC8A bmdma 0xFFFFC2000002AC00 irq 193 <6>ata2: SATA max UDMA/100 cmd 0xFFFFC2000002ACC0 ctl 0xFFFFC2000002ACCA bmdma 0xFFFFC2000002AC08 irq 193 <6>ata3: SATA max UDMA/100 cmd 0xFFFFC2000002AE80 ctl 0xFFFFC2000002AE8A bmdma 0xFFFFC2000002AE00 irq 193 <6>ata4: SATA max UDMA/100 cmd 0xFFFFC2000002AEC0 ctl 0xFFFFC2000002AECA bmdma 0xFFFFC2000002AE08 irq 193 <6>e100: Intel(R) PRO/100 Network Driver, 3.4.1-NAPI <6>e100: Copyright(c) 1999-2005 Intel Corporation