Strange disk behavior with Fedora 9

[Dan Hensley]

My system has 2 SATA drives that are identical in size.  One of them has
FC6 on it.  It used to be my primary disk until yesterday, when I did a
fresh install of FC9 on my other disk.  I then swapped the SATA cables
on my motherboard so that FC9 would boot.

Now when I boot FC9, I get these messages about my FC6 drive:

attempt to access beyond end of device
sdb: rw=0, want=473290797, limit=268435455
printk: 7 messages suppressed.
Buffer I/O error on device sdb5, logical block 39935552
attempt to access beyond end of device
sdb: rw=0, want=473290797, limit=268435455
Buffer I/O error on device sdb5, logical block 39935552

I can mount all of the partitions (and in fact FC9 does this for me,
even though I don't want it to--how do I turn this annoying behavior
off???).  However, I can't fdisk it:

# fdisk /dev/sdb

The number of cylinders for this disk is set to 16709.
There is nothing wrong with that, but this is larger than 1024,
and could in certain setups cause problems with:
1) software that runs at boot time (e.g., old versions of LILO)
2) booting and partitioning software from other OSs
   (e.g., DOS FDISK, OS/2 FDISK)

Unable to seek on /dev/sdb


If I swap drives around (GRUB is installed on both) so that FC6 boots,
the drive appears to be just fine.

Any ideas on what is going on, and how to correct it?

Thanks,
Dan