Also the fact that the drive is showing up as /dev/hda instead of /dev/sda means that you are not using the best driver for the hard drive. Go into the bios and try either native mode to serial ATA or SATA AHCI enable. You might need to rebuild the initrd from a rescue disk after you boot.
native mode to serial ATA
Did that. Now it shows up as sda again. I no longer get the errors either but I get this now.
[root@server log]# hdparm -i /dev/sda
/dev/sda: HDIO_GET_IDENTITY failed: Inappropriate ioctl for device
Smartd also complains on boot up.
Smartd is not that smart - it has known issues with SATA drives, as I have posted on in this group recently.
I ran smartctl and Seatool (from Seagate, since mine is a Seagate drive) tests on it and had no problems. Of course, my WD and Hitachi SATA drives don't do this, so maybe it is peculiar to Seagates....
Smartd is having a fit about Seek_Error_Rate. Like you said from looking at a few google searches this is normal with Seagate drives and does not mean they will fail.
I think I may be close to having most issues straightened out with this messy upgrade. My iostats are still 3 times higher then prior to upgrade though. Is it perhaps an issue that Centos 4.7 does not support the Intel ICH9R SATA controller very well?
Thanks.
Matt