scsi problem-can't boot please help

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?

What SCSI ID do you have the drives (actually the SCA adapters) set to? The customary ID for the boot drive is zero.

How do you have your boot order set in BIOS? (What are the listed options, and what order are they set to?)

That low-level format... Did you use the SCSI controller's built-in BIOS utilities to do it, or did you use a software tool?

It's odd that swapping the drive allowed you to boot. I don't have an explanation off the top of my head for that one.

The original ID was 3, changed to 0 while trying. Boot order is floppy-cdrom-scsi. Low level format was the bios util on the 29160. I'm totally lost. I'm not sure what else to try. I did try a utility called mbrwiz or something like that, and every time I tried to do anything with that it threw an error 12, invalid summin' in the mbr, but I couldn't find any documentation about error codes for the program.