I was given a couple 147gig 10k Seagate u320 sca drives, and cannot get my machine to boot from them. I'm connecting them to an adaptec 29160, which shows them running at u160 in the bios, terminator indicates u160. I can read and write from the drives, but when the system does it's first reboot during the os install, I get a black screen for about a minute, then a message that the kernel failed to load. I've tried both winxp pro and linux with the same result, in a couple different systems. I've been thinking it's the mbr, but I've tried fixmbr in the recovery console and fdisk /mbr from a 98 boot disk with no effect. I swapped the drive out of the sca adapter with an older drive and it booted right up with that drive. In the console, fixmbr warned that the drive had a non-standard or missing mbr, but also said it was successfully written. Also tried a low level format on one of the drives, changed nothing.

Is there such a thing as a hard drive that is non-bootable?