Booting from USB with initrd

[gabriel <gabriel.j@telia.com>]

Hi Im trying to boot an encrypted file system using an initrd on a USB. 
I use syslinux for the actual boot process as I couldnt get Grub to boot
of it for some reason. This is the .cfg

 default vmlinuz
 timeout 100
 prompt 1
 label linux
 kernel vmlinuz
 append initrd=/initrd.gz root=/dev/ram0 rootfstype=minix init=/linuxrc

As far as I can tell this should load the initrd but that never happens.
Everything seems to boot fine. Syslinux loads the kernel and I get to 
the point where initrd should be mounted only to get this error.

Kernel panic - not syncing: VFS: Unable to mount root fs on unknown-block(1,0)
followed by the USB information and stop.
<5> Vendor SWISSBIT Mode: Victorinox 2.0 Rev 2.00
Type Direct-Access ANSI SCSI Revision: 02
SCSI device sdb: 1022720 512 byte hdwr sectors (524mb)
sdb: Write Protect is off
sdb: asuming driver cache: write-through

I have support for minix, vfat, ext2 and ext3 in the kernel. I have recompiled the 
kernel 
like 20 times to test different things. So what Im thinking is that the 
USB device doesn't 
get realized before syslinux tries to load it?

Oh I do have the ramdisk in the kernel and everything.