The exclusive refs held above are never released.  Thus the kernel 
correctly denies any other exclusive access to the devices.  dm is 
holding them all.  I have never used dm so don't know much about it.  It 
seems that you'll have to make dm ignore those SCSI disks if you wanna 
use them for any other purpose.

I've never used it either, at least not directly.  Whatever it is doing
is automatic.  However, you're right, I'm sorry for bringing up someone
else's bug -- if nothing else, its good google fodder ;-)  So far, its
looking to me like a bug in Ubuntu Dapper.  I haven't yet figured out
how to tell Ubuntu to leave my devices alone (yes, I looked at udev),
but at least I can get my disks working!

$ dmsetup remove sde1
root@san001:~# mkfs.ext3 -m1 /dev/sde1 2>/dev/null >/dev/null && echo 1
1

Thank you!

-- 
Eric Windisch [off-list ref]
GrokThis.net