Have you tried entering the BIOS of your computer and disabling APIC in the menu, then do your HDD install without having to use any cheatcodes. Also try to establish if too many devices are sharing the same IRQ look at the BIOS boot screen as you switch on, find out which IRQ your USB device uses and see if some other hardware is using the same IRQ , try moving pci cards into diferent pci slots to see if they will assign different IRQs, also try turning on/off plug and play OS installed in BIOS.
One point I should like to make is try to avoid buying USB devices as most of them are designed to work with Windows and use software controllers, always try to purchase genuine hardware devices and you should'nt end up in this situation again.