Hard disk problems
While I thought it would be a great idea to keep /home on a separate partition for backup purposes and the like, it turned out to be more of a headache than I had planned.
When attempting to login at the Ubuntu prompt I would get an error message saying that my /home directory did not exist. Before those errors I would usually have a problem with /etc/fstab not recognizing my external USB drive or telling me it failed fsck. The odd thing is that the external USB drive and the drive which /home resided on had nothing to do with each other.
After moving /home back to the partition that the rest of Feisty is installed on, I was able to login just fine. (Once again I must say that Puppy Linux saved the day.) I still get superblock errors on my external drive, even though it works fine after the system boots up.
I think I will handle backups using this method with tar.
I also found Unison which should handle syncing with my USB flash drive.