Sometimes the guest intentionally seeks the error. Example?
TrueCrypt 5.0 supports encryption of the full system disk. To get the real size of the disk, the truecrypt driver queries the number of blocks of the disk, but then tries to read after the last block, until it gets an error. Qemu hangs in this operation. So, for me, the blockdriver has to give the errors back to the guest (in this case, reading behind eof). In no cases, qemu should die because of that.
Tom
PS: I had to patch truecrypt because of this qemu feature.