yep... I've had this problem once. on my first KI board I bought. made the mistake of bidding on a "it might work and it might not, I have no way of testing it" deal.
I never learned the actual cause, the best I can come up with is that one of the surface mount components went bad. the Altera chips are no longer made. these boards were highly prone to breakage of the surface mount pins. particularly on the CPU (the one with the heatsink)
lots of people fucked with these trying to pop the heatsinks off and wound up ripping the entire CPUs out.
my solution was to stop trying to find one of these for cheap, pay the premium and get one that's tested working. I got mine from quarterarcade actually. when you consider some people buy these cheap and start trying to sell them for $400, the $230~ I paid was actually good. you can gamble on some of the idiots that try pawning these with broken hard drives on ebay and maybe get one for cheap, but know this, that there will be dozens of other people with the same know-how to identify a hard drive failure and I've seen these go for way more than I even paid.
it won't be a rom issue, or hard drive. you could try probing channelmanic, see if he's worked on these. it's sometimes something very stupid like one pin broke on the CPU, you can try inspecting it with a magnifying glass to make sure.