I've dug around a little and found out the following. I got a 2.5 (44 pin) to 3.5 (40 pin) PATA adapter and I connected an old IDE HDD and I still couldn't get it to boot with a USB keyboard attached so I copied Ubuntu 10.10 server onto a USB drive and looked at a few boot options it has. I tried noapic and for some reason it works!
I'm going to try a SATA device with noapic soon and see what happens.
Thank you guys for your help!