Did you try installing the SATA II driver when Vista during the installation
phase?

I also had problems with Vista on my Gateway laptop using a SATA 120GB hard
drive. Vista would not install the SATA driver. According to the Vista
Upgrade Advisor, there were no hardware compatibility issues. There were
software incompatibility issues, which I expected, however, I could not get
Vista to see the SATA controller -- even installing Vista drivers for the
SATA controller.


"JB1300" <jb1300@gmail.com> wrote in message
news:1171207094.841860.50760@s48g2000cws.googlegro ups.com...
>I found that installing Windows Vista Ultimate on an AMD 64 4000 with
> 2 Gig of RAM on an ASROCK Motherboard - 939Dual-SATA2 that the install
> was extremely slow. I installed the chipset and SATA II drivers once
> the os loaded (painfully slow) and rebooted. This caused the computer
> to keep rebooting and not load the OS. The system was so slow that I
> was ready to return Vista.
>
> I did some hunting around and the problem was in the BIOS (which was
> already upgraded to the latest version) and I had set my SATA II to
> run in SATA mode - of course this makes sense. However this was the
> culprit. I set this to run in IDE mode and did a re-install. It went
> super fast and all is well. I had tried to boot when it was in IDE
> mode but it was rebooting as well which prompted me to re-install.
>