Hi guys. I'm an absolute newbie, been running Ubuntu 7.10 "Gutsy Gibbon" for about a week. I got this message on startup yesterday.

[ 17.894410] RAM DISK: ran out of compressed data
[ 17.894466] invalid compressed format (err=1)
[ 17.895094] Kernel panic - not syncing: VFS: Unable to mount root fs on unknown block(0,0)


This means I can't load my computer, I'm currently running off a Live CD. Running Gutsy on a Toshiba Equium L10-300. I don't know what system specs might be helpful so if you need any do say. Also in case this has any relevance I'm not dual booting and the last time I was on my computer I had to manually turn of the computer because the quit button wasn't working

This might be a memory problem. I had the same thing happen to me. Try running the memory test, which is an option when you boot the live CD.

Tried that unfortunately it seems there was no success, nothing came up.

How long did you let it run ??? - several hours hopefully.
If you have the liveCD running, do a fsck on the hard disk partition(s).

It ran for about an hour, but it got to the 100% and went back to 0 and started running the same tests it had done at the beginning again. Do you want me to just leave it running?

Also when you say do a fsck on the hard disk partitions, what do I need to do? Also my hard drive doesn't have a partition as far as I'm aware, because I devoted the whole thing to Ubuntu.

Sorry if these are completely obvious questions.

Probably something went wrong with the initrd you may be using while booting. I myself prefer to compile linux kernel with all required hardware support and hence don't need any initrd. I suggest you to try what syg00 said. If you don't know the partition where your linux exists, check /dev directory contents when running the livecd. If you are lucky, you will see a device named like hda1 or sda1. That is the name of your partition. Then as root, check filesystem on that partition by fsck /dev/hda1. Then try to reboot.
If nothing helps, it is still possible to run the linux on your hard disk using the kernel from live cd. For that you need to mount your linux partition and 'chroot' into it. From there you should be able to reinstall kernel image using your apt-get. Before chrooting, make sure you mount proc, sysfs and dev file systems into the corresponding directories in mounted partition. Do some reading on chroot. Best of luck.