Patrick...
As I mentioned in my first post, you don't yet believe that the cause is SIMPLE, that LVM isn't able to touch drives that it doesn't like the partitioning of, when its exact purpose is to SET that, but it's typical from what I've seen, one of the charming quirks of OS/2.
ddan is entirely correct (which I only point out because it seems you - quite logically - think something so simple cannot be the issue at hand - unfortunately LVM is far from logical in it's (lack of) handling of "unknown" partition types).
LVM will fail with all sorts of spectacular, and not so spectacular errors depending on what unknown (to LVM) file system type it encounters. Every time I re-purpose an XP drive to OS/2 (I sometimes buy used drives and for a while many of the new drives I was buying came pre-formatted FAT32 or NTFS), I run into the same problem - and various errors about not being able to operate the disk, and even occassionally, LVM reporting incorrect disk and partition sizes for the unsupported partitions. Invariably, most of the time it ends with the red screen of nonsense about (paraphrased) "not being able to operate the disk", or "no (space to create a) bootable partition big enough (must be at least 120GB)" message.
One additional note though, LVM will also report errors in non-existant partitions for things like media bays (card readers, etc) with nothing in them. Ignore those errors. Those seem to usually show up as 96MB "corrupt" (per LVM) partitions. They are simply the BIOS's pointer to those media slots (if I understand it correctly). Occassionally, the same occurs with certain CD-RW and DVD-R/RW drives that have weird cache segments/memory that act almost like a second drive - again, ignore those errors... the actual hard disk should be partitionable and work fine (assuming you follow ddan's and/or saijin's steps below).
Robert