Yeah Vbe, looks like the same to me as well.
Prabhu, one more scenario is this. kfs_vxfs and mkfs_hfs do not handle blank
media properly on new OEM MO devices. It happens sometimes. Like, The blank media returns a Blank Check condition on a first read and read size of the buffer is zero. In that case, even #dd should be working fine. However, 0 bytes would have been read. An attempt to create a filesystem with newfs/mkfs may fail:
A workaround is to write null bytes to possible LVM and VxVM header locations as well to the very last block.
Here, possibility looks like a hardware issue. Let's just try these kinda things as well.
-DB