In my experience, the color bands black, brown, and violet can look the same without careful examination in bright sunlight. Of those, I find violet and brown very hard to differentiate even with new components. True, a first band of "black" is indeed unusual and unexpected. That is why it is often useful to use a meter to tell what it is.
Ir you have not measured it, how do you know it is not an inductor? those colours are consistent with the markings of an inductor and they do come in that sort of package some times.
The problem is resistors do not have the first band as black. Inductors do.
Is there any place where there is another the same?
That crack in the body of the part will render any measurement invalid.
What is it from (brand and model)? Do you have any chance of getting a schematic?
More info may help. As it is, there is nothing more can be done as you have not given enough info. And just because the board has an "R" label, it may not be a resistor. The board may have been designed for a decoupling resistor but production could have found an inductor gave better results. Can you trace out the circuit or post some pictures of the board?
Well, That is a new one for me. So you just take off a decimal places for the blacks? I'm still unsure how to read that to get 5Mohms.
I wonder why the manufacturer decided to go with their own "standard"
That is the thing about standards. They are good, that is why we have so many
So, the original resistor in question may be 0.027R ???
For that particular series, Ohmite uses a white multiplier band to mean 10^-3 (http://www.ohmite.com/assets/docs/res_wl.pdf?r=false). I guess the theory is that one is unlikely to confuse a gigaohm resistor with a milliohm one. And if you did, you might get a real surprise.
The TS's resistor is may well not be Ohmite. In fact it does not look like the Ohmite examples. However, if the black band for some reason is meant as a leading zero, one could read its value as 0.26 ohm too -- the multiplier band certainly looks like silver instead of white..