A little help please

So basically I am stuck, and am going to ask you, my readers for some help. I have an old IBM thinkpad 600e which I was previously installed and ran Ubuntu on fine, and before that damn small linux. You all probably know I am good at breaking my system and I did it yet again but this time on my laptop.

So I figured I would reinstall ubuntu. I went at it but got errors about not having enough memory for the GDM to start up...what ever that meant. So I downloaded a bootable partition manager an deleted all my old partitions and created one new one, with ext3.

Next I went to try booting into the ubuntu live cd again, but this time got this error:

not syncing: vfs: unable to mount fs on unknown-block(1,0)


If you have any suggestions or ideas, please post them in the comments section. I will update you guys if things get fixed.

Thanks

Java Frustrations!

I have not run into to many problems on Linux that have gotten me really annoyed for long periods of time but this java one is a pain. Recently I have been trying to upload pictures to facebook and fotki but both have java based uploaders which just don't load in Firefox for me in gutsy. What I can't figure out is Firefox says I have java installed when I go to about:plugins I get this(Click picture to see full size image):


Java applications just don't seem to be working at all, if you got any ideas let me know, I would very much appreciate the help.