Its not clear to me if you are booting from the Live CD, or from your hard drive. If from your hard drive, then it sounds like you might have a garbled grub entry. Look at /boot/grub/menu.lst and make sure the 'kernel' line looks something like:
kernel /vmlinuz-2.6.20-13-generic root=UUID=1d2edee6-985a-4908-b06b-42c460fbb075 ro quiet splash
Its not clear to me if you are booting from the Live CD, or from your hard drive. If from your hard drive, then it sounds like you might have a garbled grub entry. Look at /boot/grub/menu.lst and make sure the 'kernel' line looks something like:
kernel /vmlinuz- 2.6.20- 13-generic root=UUID= 1d2edee6- 985a-4908- b06b-42c460fbb0 75 ro quiet splash