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0e1f616
(Get the code!)
I have had the same problem on Ubuntu karmic and Suse 11.1. Both installations went well (apart for the fact the GRUB overwrites the disk area used by the RAID on my system in both cases - this is solved by removing stage1_5 from the GRUB installation directory - rename/move or delete the file).
After a successful install both systems started without error and fairly fast. However, after downloading the 'recent updates' (could be irrelevant - see later) that are applied after installation, the system(s) started with the above error "device reported invalid CHS sector 0". Initially this is attempted at UDMA/100 and then the bus is gradually degraded through UDMA/66 and UDMA/33, until finally the disk connection is run at the slowest speed. This takes just under 10 minutes to complete on my system, and I guess would explain the slow startup behaviour experienced by users of other systems as described above. After this the system runs very raggedly - not as smooth as I am used to with various Linux installations. I assume that the bus connection is kept at the lowest speed and the swap partition does not allow fast paging.
One might think that this is a hardware fault but so many people reporting the same error, here and on other forums, that something tells me this is a software fault... and as it happens on more than one Linux release, it is not system specific, but likely to be linked to the GRUB bootloader itself.
The 'standby' issue raised above and not the updates might give a clue. From what I can perceive, GRUB attempts to 'resume' the system from the data stored on the swap partition when the system shuts down. If the swap partition cannot be read as expected during startup then I expect that we would see an error. Removing or commenting out the option 'resume=/dev/swap' from the grub installation file in /boot/grub/menu.lst should solve this.
I am not in a position to try this immediately but would be interested in any comments. I intend to check this myself in a couple of days.