USB booting :: sandisk hangs

Anyone expirence a problem where the boot sequence hangs after printing out
SYSLINUX on one machine, and on another machine the boot gets further, the DSL message is displayed but it hangs at that point.

This is a 128MB disk with a full partition (sized to whole disk)

Disk /dev/sda: 979 cylinders, 8 heads, 32 sectors/track
Units = cylinders of 131072 bytes, blocks of 1024 bytes, counting from 0

the geometry looks ok to me ....

original here.