I installed Linspire 5 and it worked well until I began playing around with the settings trying to setup a group and trying to get the monitor to resize the browser screens. They cut off the pages on the left side and I have to stretch/manually resize the page and pull it back and forth to see everything. After the second reinstall at boot time I got GRUB error 21 and did not know how to repair this so reinstalled again. Most of my devices were blocked. After reinstalling many times I am still having most of the problems except for grub error 21. I did not destructively reformat the disk but did light format. Is that the problem? Some of the time I can force the cdrw dvdrw to work but I have yet to get the floppy to read or write and most of the hard drives were mislabeled now, and the usb hard drive does not show up or work at all although it is listed in the device manager.

Seems like the fstab is not configured properly.
I suggest you take a look at the fstab file in the /etc/ directory.
Comment out all lines that relate to other partitions except the root and other system partition like proc etc. Any line that has an sdx, hdX, srX etc can be deleted (where X is any letter). Then reboot and see.