I'm very curious to know why you couldn't install Ubuntu on it. I could understand having driver issues once the install was finished, but for it to fail outright seems strange.

I wonder if there's a bad sector on that drive. To me, that's the only thing that could prevent all those OS installs from finishing. I can't recall if there's a free live CD out there with drive scanning tools, but that might be the culprit. You could also just try swapping out the hard drive and trying one of these installs again.