when I installed my CF kit from RevX, I tried using the Any-IDE rom that he supplied with it, and all mine did was the rolling blue screen, and it would just keep repeating this. I had an Any-IDE rom that I made myself that I just used instead.
so I wouldn't say that it's necessarily the drive at fault, but probably the U98 boot rom.
for the hell of it everyone that has this problem, did you try removing the U98 and cleaning the pins AND the socket? there's a jumper next to it that says 4 MB/8 MB, make sure that's correctly set to 4 MB.
the other problem that can happen if the U98 is bad is you'll get a white line pattern screen. this just means the whole thing is french toast. I wanna say one of those Altera surface mount chips has something to do with this problem as well. that was a long time ago for me, I just sold my bad boards with that to people who needed rams and stuff.
look around in the for sale section on here, you can get some good bargains sometimes.