MINT 13 Cinnamin, KDE, KUBUNTU 11.10 will not boot

Had a spare 500GB Seagate Barracuda Sata II hard drive sitting around dying for something to do.
So I popped it into my PC, switched the Sata wire and power cord from my Ubuntu (Samsung 620GB) hard drive to it.

Used my live CD's, all booted up, then decided to install each OS a number of times. Not one would reboot from the hard drive. I would usually get a few colored lines going across the screen then goes black. When Kubuntu is installed, a blue Kubuntu screen appears for 10 seconds then goes black.

After 6 hours, I decided to plug my Ubuntu hard drive back in and call it quits.

I have no problems setting up those OS in Virtual Box on my Ubuntu 10.04LTS drive.

Any ideas what the problem is?