Grub Hangs at Loading stage 1.5

[russh347 at charter.net]

We've got a FAI-BootCD built.  Rebooting with the CD in the drive results in a hang with the following:

Booting 'hd'
root (hd0,1)

Booting with the CD ejected results in:

GRUB Loading stage1.5

GRUB loading, please wait...

/boot/grub/menu.lst and the kernel appear to be correct.  I booted a CDlinux iso and tried grub-install again with no result.

The machine is has a single 40GB HD with the bulk of the space allocated to hda1 and and extended swap partition of 512MB.  It's a brand-new Intel P4 (2.8Ghz).  We've installed repeatedly and without incident using d-i.

Any help is appreciated.