Methods and structure for improved tolerance of errors during initialization of a storage volume. More specifically, features and aspects of the invention provide for tolerating read errors during read-modify-write or read-peer-write processing of I/O requests overlapped with initialization of the volume affected by the I/O request. Features and aspects of the system detect such an error and, if the volume is being initialized, attempt graceful recovery of the error rather than shutting down or otherwise disabling the uninitialized volume.