Speed fixed! Still crashes.....

I have been fiddling around with Ubuntu today and talking to my software design teacher about it as he has had a good deal more experience with Linux than I have. (He tells me he's been working since the days of Red Hat 3 but I'm not quite sure how far back that is).

He didn't shed that much light on my problem with the invalid compressed format (err=1) but suggested working with FAT 32 instead of FAT 16.

I did some more searching today and came across http://www.debuntu.org/how-to-install-ubuntu-linux-on-usb-bar.

It solved one of my problems. By following the instructions on that site I was able to get the kernel and to load much faster. In fact what took several minutes now takes about 15 seconds. Thats great but I have still had no progress on the invalid compressed format error.

I have however noticed that when Ubuntu loads from the CD the bit up the top of the screen where it says loading initrd.gz places more dots on the screen than when booting from USB whereas the vmlinuz doesn't. The error happen immediately after the initrd.gz file finishes loading.

Maybe it isn't fully loading initrd.gz fully anyway.

My searching on the net suggests that it may be hardware related so I might have a bit of a fiddle with BIOS settings and see what happens.