Thanks to Carl, Nick and Volker for the advice. Now an update. I swapped the hard drive with another PC which had a fully functioning install, after which the Hard drive worked fine.
I swapped the cables in the PC with ones I knew worked. However I'm unable to run any additional tests as I'm now lucky if the computer boots past whatever the part of booting that allows you into BIOS is called, let alone completing an operating system start up (this goes for LiveCD's as well). --Slosh
