MH troubleshooting

[BCWolfen]

So a friend of mine managed to pick up a 250W MH ballast, a mogul socket and 2x250W 10K MH bulbs for free. He works for the school district and they have been swapping out their old MH lighting for more energy efficient stuff. We're having some trouble and I hope to get some insight as to what it might be. These components were ripped out ungraciously by the contractors and just dumped into a storage closet where they will rot until the school is torn down. (isn't our system wonderful?) Anyway I think it may be the ballast and he's going to grab the other 4 that are there on Monday to try. but heres what we got.

Did a quick connection just to see if we had power and got the bulb to fire. I only left it on for about 1 second as all connections were temporary. We assumed all would be good. Upon building our box (out of an old computer power supply) and hooking it up with quick disconnects and an on/off switch we fired it up for real.
The bulb fired immediately, then it started to flicker inside the little inner bulb. Slowly at first then faster and faster. Then suddenly it went out. A few seconds later a small blue glow appeared. Then it fired again and repeated the process.

Thinking it may be a bad bulb we tried the other. Same results. Thinking they may both be bad due to being tossed around I tried one of my 250W. Same thing.

To rule out bulbs I tried all 3 in my lights and they fired perfectly.
To rule out the longer cables, quick disconnects and switch I rewired everything direct and plugged t in. Same thing.
I even went as far as to clean all the wires (they had a bit of corrosion on them) Same thing.

So now I'm pretty sure its a bad ballast but wanted to know if this seemed a typical result of a dead ballast.

lmk
Thanks