informations i can give:
1. IBM 60GB drive. dmesg excerpt:
[[[
hda: IC35L060AVER07-0, ATA DISK drive
hda: max request size: 128KiB
hda: 120103200 sectors (61492 MB) w/1916KiB Cache, CHS=65535/16/63, UDMA(100)
hda: cache flushes not supported
 hda: hda1 hda2 hda3 hda4 < hda5 hda6 hda7 hda8 hda9 >
]]]

2. yast warns about "disk is part of a raid". it was, but isnt anymore. I cant 
reset the whole partition table at the moment as my reiser4 partitions are not 
readable with 10.0.

3. fdisk -l works fine.
[[[
$ fdisk -l /dev/hda

Disk /dev/hda: 61.4 GB, 61492838400 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 7476 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/hda1               1         128     1028128+  82  Linux swap / Solaris
/dev/hda2   *         129        2217    16779892+  83  Linux
/dev/hda3            2218        3784    12586927+  83  Linux
/dev/hda4            3785        7476    29655990    f  W95 Ext'd (LBA)
/dev/hda5            3785        4828     8385898+  83  Linux
/dev/hda6            4829        5350     4192933+  83  Linux
/dev/hda7            5351        5611     2096451   83  Linux
/dev/hda8            5612        5739     1028128+  83  Linux
]]]
  
the partitioning on the disk was generated with 9.3 betas.

strace and ltrace logs are attached. gdb didnt give any useful informations. not 
even with debug symbols for util-linux installed.