Comment 37 for bug 543875

I ran into a similar issue that Chip Piller, comment #17 had. I also have a HP Elitebook 8540(w). Booting Ubuntu 11.04 via USB on the right side of the notebook gave me the exact same error; however, using the left USB port on the 8540 allowed me to boot the system successfully with a blank hard drive and then allowed me to install Ubuntu on that blank hard driver.