Ubuntu Installation - cannot start partitioner

I used liveUSB to make a bootable Ubuntu 8.04 USB stick. The Live CD boots, and I can run the installer, but once I hit forward after choosing the time zone, a window pops up saying "Starting Partitioner" and goes to 13%. It never goes beyond this point. There is no activity on the thumbdrive or the SSD. The system doesn't hang-- I can quit the installer and reboot, but I can never get it to move past this point. Has this happened to anyone else? Any ideas for getting past this?

 

Try to escape to a terminal (Ctrl + Alt + F2) and type in dmesg to see what comes up. Let us know what it says and I can help you further.

 

I went to the terminal with ctrl-alt-f2, and it is scrolling "SQUASHFS error" and something about unable to read block at different hex addresses. It's scrolling much too fast to make out exactly what it's saying.

 

Sounds like a faulty USB stick - either the media is failing, or there's a problem with the live-usb installation. Try it on a different USB stick and see if you have same problem.

 

I finally got it figured out. The installation cd I used to prepare the live USB stick was corrupted. If anyone else gets a similar error, try comparing the md5sum to the sum listed on ubuntu's support pages. Thanks for the help!