I have a Dell Dimension 600 XPS Phoenix BIOS version A03, the original HD crashed and burned. Dell didn't send OS disks (was on the original drive and no back up disks), so I am trying to install Ubuntu 11.10 on the new drive. The new drive is a Western Digital 1TB. I formatted the new drive by putting it in an enclosure and formatting it with Windows 7 on my HP system.

When I put the cd in the cdrom it boots to the cd with the Advanced user screen (won't boot into the usually Windows GUI). When I try to install (or run from live Cd) I get the same error message.
Same with trying the various boot options.

The message is:

VFS: cannot open root device "(NULL)" or unknown-block(8,1)
Please append a correct "root=" boot option: 
Here are the available partitions:
Kernal Panic- not syncing: VFS: Unable to mount rootfs on unknown-block(8,1)

and then it lists Trace messages then freezing.

Any help or suggestions are appreciated in advance.