Simply Mepis and Thinkpad X30 question

I used to run mepis on my insprion 8000 fine with xp but every time I try to boot up the simply mepis cd it gets to a point where it says unable to start filesystem Halting, regardless of what boot choice i chose. memory is fine I have tested as well as the HD. any ideas?

When you say that the memory and hard disk are fine, do they meet the recommended requirements?

* 4GB free space on the hard disk
* 512MB RAM