shutdown leaves "not cleanly unmounted" disk and /dev/sdb3 is invalid

[tug williams]

eee 701 with linux on an 8Gb external SD card (/dev/sdb).

I logout of icewm then shutdown from gdm.

When I reboot I get the following message

>> Determining root device...
!! Block device /dev/sdb3 is not a valid root device...
!! Could not find the root block in .
  Please specify another value or: <blah blah>
root block device() :: _

I enter /dev/sdb3 - exactly the same device it complained about! and it
continues booting for a while. But then says that
     "/ was not cleanly unmounted. check forced:"

It fixes the disk, forces a reboot, repeats the complaint about
/dev/sdb3 not being valid. I manually reenter /dev/sdb3 again and it
boots correctly.

I think this could be related to the fact that I installed linux on the
memory Card from a usb stick.

My eee 701 configuration is
   4 Gb internal SSD /dev/sda
   8 Gb external SDHC /dev/sdb

However if you boot up with a USB stick plugged in also, it decides that
   4 Gb internal SSD /dev/sda
   8 Gb USB stick /dev/sdb
   8 Gb external SDHC /dev/sdc

So after I installed from a USB stick to the external SD card, and
rebooted without the usb stick I had to modify grub.conf and /etc/fstab
to point to the "new" place (changed from /dev/sdc* to /dev/sdb*).

This boot process is beginning to irritate me. Any thoughts about how to
resolve this properly?

Thanks

Tug


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