I have already tried uncompress, gzip, and all other solutions that come up as google results and these have not worked for me.

To get just the image search for the GZ signature - 1f 8b 08 00.

> od -A d -t x1 vmlinuz | grep '1f 8b 08 00'
0024576 24 26 27 00 ae 21 16 00 1f 8b 08 00 7f 2f 6b 45

so the image begins at 24576+8 => 24584. Then just copy the image from the point and decompress it -

> dd if=vmlinuz bs=1 skip=24584 | zcat > vmlinux
1450414+0 records in
1450414+0 records out
1450414 bytes (1.5 MB) copied, 6.78127 s, 214 kB/s

Got these instructions verbatim from a forum online: http://www.codeguru.com/forum/showthread.php?t=415186

This process does not work for me and end up giving errors that states file not found 0024576 and all subsequent numbers.

How do I proceed extracting vmlinux from vmlinuz?

Thank you.

EDITED: This is a reverse engineering question. I have no access to the distro to install any RPM or recompile. I start with nothing but vmlinuz.