The mistery of Chakra Linux

As many of you probably noticed from recent articles of mine, I very much like what KDE is doing lately. As a result, it's sort of an obvious move for me to gravitate towards great KDE implementations. In that regard, Chakra is a very interesting one, not only because it is solely dedicated to KDE, but also because it is based on Arch Linux.

Unfortunately for me, I cannot even get Chakra to start working. I follow the instructions in their Wiki and think I am doing things right, but no joy. I am pretty certain it's all down to hardware support issues, but perhaps I am missing something, so I decided to post about it, describe what I am doing and see if someone can chime in and offer advice or a fix (plus I want to try a different approach, not the usual Forums/IRC).

Yesterday I went on and downloaded the latest release, Chakra 2011.10.26, from HERE. Since I have an assortment of machines, I usually am conservative and go for the 32bit release, chakra-2011.10.26-Edn-i686.iso in this case. Once downloaded, I successfully tested it under Virtualbox, being able to boot the ISO and navigate the Chakra desktop in my virtual machine. That told me the ISO was good, so it was time to create a LiveUSB. In order to do so, I go as follows:

1. Enter a USB drive and format it as FAT32.
2. Unmount it from a terminal:
   
   sudo umount /dev/sdb2
   
   
3. Copy the ISO to the USB using dd:
   
   sudo dd if=chakra-2011.10.26-Edn-i686.iso of=/dev/sdb
   
   
4. After a few minutes, the process finishes (apparently) successfully. I then test the newly created LiveUSB drive on my old trusty HP NX7400 and it works just fine, which in this case tells me the creation of the LiveUSB worked out well.
5. Since I don't want to install Chakra on my 7400 because it is, well, old, I aim for the other more modern machines I use. When I plug the LiveUSB in and start up any of those machines, I get nothing but a frozen BIOS screen while the USB drive seems to keep reading and reading.
   
   The machines I use include: HP 5320m Elitebook, HP 6930p Elitebook, HP 2730p Elitebook and HP 2740p Elitebook (the former two are notebooks while the latter are tablets). All these four machines are very much Linux friendly and I have never experienced issues loading something as elementary as the boot manager.
   
   

Any ideas welcome!