If your BIOS boots from the Memory Stick, but you can see only sequences of ones and zeroes, you can try an alternative bootsector from spblinux. As the site is sometimes down you can download the bootsector here(Version 1.01). Just put this one on /dev/sda and try it out (dd if=spb2_mbr.sec of=/dev/sda). Many thanks to Christian Ostheimer for his great work (I didn't believe anymore in booting from USB, but his spblinux made it possible ;-)