Windows 7 - Cant boot from ANY IDE type drive...?

Hey everyone, I have bought 2 IDE drives from Ebay now, an 80gb and a 40gb.
I have had no luck with either drive in trying to make them boot. They all install the OS and then after a restart none of them can boot to finish the install. I seem to only be able to boot from SATA drives on my computer. (I have 3 of them all with OS' installed)

When I plug the IDE drives in both of them are detected. Both of them install an operating system fine without problems (tried Xp, Vista & 7) but NONE of them finish the installation afterward...

Xp installs and then gives me 'A disk error occured, press CTRL+ALT+DEL to reboot'
Vista gives me 'The drive has stopped responding press ENTER to try again, press F2 to reboot'
Windows 7 gives me 'A system boot failed, this could be caused but removing a removable media such as a USB or CD ROM drive or because your hardware is not communicating properly. Remove the drive and try again'

Whats up with these IDE drives? NONE of them work... I have never tried to boot from an IDE drive before a few weeks ago but this is stupid. I am starting to think that my computer cannot boot from IDE drives and only from SATA ones.

I looked in my BIOS to see if I could find if I had it set to AHCI or IDE but there isn't any place to check or change such options. Usually if it was in AHCI then Xp wouldn't even get to install...

My Mobo is a Gigabyte EP31 DS3L.

I've done plenty of google searches that all turn up pages from back in 2004 which are unrelated to my problem...

Does anyone know what the issue could be? I need to be able to boot from one of these IDE's prep it for a friend and then give it to her so she can use her computer again...

The main drive that I am trying to get working is a 40gb (ST340014A)
Needless to say I have tried Quick and Slow formats from all of those OS' before installing and all are detected in the BIOS.

I am really tearing my hair out over this...