Installed Ubuntu 8.04

[Matt Graham]

After a long battle with technology, Clayton Stapleton wrote:
> Dan Lund wrote:
>> Had something to do with the segment it was located on the disk, and
>> the hardware having problems addressing past a certain part at boot.
>> For some reason, hard reset and soft reset have different
>> characteristics.  & only on some hardware....

The OP has installed a distro (and probably GRUB) on a USB device.  Since the 
x86 BIOS is small and stupid, and there are no really accepted conventions 
for how the BIOS handles the device order of USB devices, it's not surprising 
that you'd have problems with bootloaders.  The easiest and best way to deal, 
IMHO, is to put /boot on an IDE, SCSI, or SATA device.  It's much easier to 
deal with BIOS vagaries there.

What *should* happen is that if the BIOS is set to "boot from USB", then the 
first USB device connected should show up as device 0x80.  Things become 
ill-defined if multiple USB devices are connected; the device that used to be 
0x80 may be seen as 0x82 on a soft-boot.  The "ERROR 21" the OP reported 
expands to "the selected disk does not exist", which is what you get when the 
BIOS numbering has changed mid-stream.  BTDT (though with IDE and SATA 
disks).

Fortunately, GRUB's interactive prompt allows you to troubleshoot and fix this 
at runtime.  Since tab completion exists, use it to see which disks are 
connected to which numbers and which partitions are on which disks.

> e2fsck -f -y -v /dev/sdc7
> /dev/sdc7 is mounted.
> e2fsck: Cannot continue, aborting.

> I suspect that Gparted was trying to e2fsck /dev/sdc7 which is locked and
> not the new partition!

What are you trying to do here?  You can't fsck a rw-mounted partition, 
obviously.  The "size" problem that Dan L mentioned is probably not the real 
problem here.  A modern BIOS should be able to address everything in the 
first 128G of a disk, even though I usually put /boot within the first 8G 
just for old-school paranoia.

-- 
   That which does not kill us makes us stranger.
   --Trevor Goodchild, Aeon Flux
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Matt G|There is no Darkness in Eternity/But only Light too dim for us to see