disappearing xfs partition

["Jeff Breidenbach" <jeff@jab.org>]

I have no special reason to believe this is xfs specific, but
is it common for partitions to vanish from the face of the
earth, at least as far as mount is concerned? I usually mount
by UUID, but here's a sightly interesting transcript by drive
letters. If this is not xfs relevant, any suggestions where
to start digging?

This is a standard format XFS partition, created with an
xfsprogs that I compiled a couple weeks ago from a source
code download. Note that other xfs partitions are mounting
fine on the same machine.


-- after a fresh reboot ---

# cfdisk /dev/sde

    Name        Flags      Part Type  FS Type          [Label]        Size (MB)
 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
    sde1                    Primary   Linux XFS                      1000202.28

# mount /dev/sde1 /mnt
mount: special device /dev/sde1 does not exist

# xfs_check /dev/sde1
/dev/sde1: No such file or directory

fatal error -- couldn't initialize XFS library

# fdisk /dev/sde

The number of cylinders for this disk is set to 121601.
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)

Command (m for help): p

Disk /dev/sde: 1000.2 GB, 1000204886016 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 121601 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x00000000

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sde1               1      121601   976760001   83  Linux

# cat /proc/version
Linux version 2.6.24-8-server (buildd@yellow) (gcc version 4.2.3
(Ubuntu 4.2.3-1ubuntu2)) #1 SMP Thu Feb 14 20:42:20 UTC 2008

# dpkg -l xfsprogs
Desired=Unknown/Install/Remove/Purge/Hold
| Status=Not/Installed/Config-f/Unpacked/Failed-cfg/Half-inst/t-aWait/T-pend
|/ Err?=(none)/Hold/Reinst-required/X=both-problems (Status,Err: uppercase=bad)
||/ Name           Version        Description
+++-==============-==============-============================================
ii  xfsprogs       2.9.5-1        Utilities for managing the XFS filesystem