Hardware :: Filesystem Check Can't Resolve Label / Formatting External Hard Drive

I'm trying to partition/format a new external hard disk for backup and have run into a snag that now prevents my computer from booting. In the description below of what happened please bear with me as I do my best to remember the commands and screen output (which for obvious reasons I don't have in front of me).As root.The disk was subsequently writable. However, I then realized that the default start and end cylinders had resulted in a very small partition apparently occupying some free cyclinders in the beginning of the disk.

So next I ran fdisk again, deleting the sdc4 I had just created and creating a new one instead, this time using the cylinders at the end of the disk. When I exited fdisk I got a message something like that the new tables can only be read upon a subsequent reboot. I ran mkfs again, but not e2label. Indeed using /sbin/fdisk -l, sdc4 still had the small size as defined initially. So I rebooted.

Now when it comes up I get something like "checking filesystems. fchk.ext3: can't resolve 'LABEL=/media/LaCie2TB1'" and am prompted to login as root to correct. I tried to simply delete sdc4 again but that didn't help. I also tried to edit /etc/fstab (using vi, which I don't know at all) but it kept telling me that this is a read only file, even though permissions are rw for root.Can anyone out there help me so that (1) I can boot into my computer, and (2) I can correctly partition and format the hard drive??