New to the forum and somewhat new to Vista. By way of some background,
I've been building my own systems since Win 3.1 and 20 Meg hard drives
so I have some experience.

Here's the issue...

I've been trying to install Vista Home Premium (clean install from
Upgrade media) on my primary desktop for over a week with major issues.
Most appear to be driver related on an nVidia board using nForce drivers
for the SATA control. I installed using the default drivers that Vista
loaded and had to deal with multiple hangs during installation. Finally
got it installed only to have it hang during Win Update and blue screen,
then fail to boot. Recovery was unsuccessful and so another reinstall
was done. Next blue screen ended up with a "Corrupt or missing" error on
ci.dll and absolutely no ability to reboot to Windows.

Decided I'd had enough and went to reinstall XP. Now I have issues with
the drives being accessible to either XP setup or Vista setup. Tried
loading SATA drivers and nothing worked. No drives visible.

I had managed to create an Acronis image after the last succesful Vista
install and decided to try to restore the drive using the boot DVD.
Acronis loads but when you use Drive Manager to view the drives the
drives appear as follows in Acronis Drive Manager:

Maxtor 500GB drive (new and formatted for install NTFS as 2 partitions
equal size) set as Drives C: and D:

In green (Unallocated) = Unallocated 80.4GB
Yellow (Primary) =
0x65 Netware 3.x+ 0 bytes
811.6 GB 0x72 (unknown)
259.4GB 0x74 (scramdisk)

Seagate 320GB single partition formatted NTFS set as Drive E:

In green (Unallocated) = Unallocated 3.136GB
Yellow (Primary) =
C: 914.5GB (FS NONE Partition 0x7 NTFS, HPFS)
0x72 (unknown) 5KB
867.2GB 0x43 (LinuxNAT/DR-DOS)

I am at my wits end. I have not tried to reformat as I cannot access
the drives from anything. I can see them in Acronis, but cannot use
Drive Mgr to format. Win XP setup sees one partition at 136GB but will
not allow installation while Vista doesn't see any of the drives at all
and asks for drivers. Tried the ref drivers for the board after all else
failed but no luck and machine has no Floppy Drive for XP driver
install.

BIOS shows both drives on their correct SATA channels and reports them
correctly. Machine was checked for any viruses prior to install and has
been continously covered by AVG since new. Machine was rock solid 24/7
on XP but needed an HD refresh so decided to try Vista.

I'm sure Ive done something to cause this but I have no clue what, or
how to recover. ANY help would be appreciated.

System Specs are:
DFI LanParty UT NF590 SLI M2R/G
4GB (currently only 2GB installed) Corsair 6400 C4 (checks healthy)
AMD Athlon X2 5000
eVGA Geforce 8600GTS driving Gateway FPD2485W display
700 watt PS SLI certified
Onboard Realtek HD audio
PS2 Mouse and keyboard
No other devices installed or in use
NO O/C, system runs very cool


--
Ralphw

Ralph W.
"Life's Short, Fly Fast"