Comment 14 for bug 428318

I thought it might be sufficient to wipe the beginning of the disk in order to fix this. It wasn't sufficient. I finally wiped the whole disk. I used

badblocks -w -t 0 -v <device>

to write zeroes all over it. It took a long time.

Thanks, Scott and Lawrence, for the excellent information and explanation. This was a scary mystery for me, esp. since Debian Lenny had no problems with the same disk. Like Lawrence, I was beginning to feel betrayed by Ubuntu. In my case, the conflicting types that caused the ambiguity were "reiserfs" (the current one that would mount neither by-label nor by-uuid) vs. "mdraid" (the previous occupant of the disk).