Vista Install Failure

I have a fairly new Asus MB with an AMD 4.2 dc and five SATA II drives.

My goal was to get Vista Business installed on one of the data drives and
switch back and fourth using the boot drive selection in BIOS as opposed to
the boot.ini file.

Anyway, I set one of my data drives (no os) as the boot drive and booted the
Vista media. It took quite a long time before setup said that it could not
find suitable media. I tried offering it both dynamic and basic disks. It
would not install. The setup program did see all the installed drives
correctly.

So is there anyway to install Vista on a NTFS partition? Most of my drives
are 500GB.

I support Vista at my office so I am not new to running it. I just wanted to
see it running with a bit more hardware than the average office computer
has.

"Ex-COC" <fakename@fakeemailserver75.org> wrote in message
news:cIR8j.22987$_m.5812@bignews4.bellsouth.net...
>
> I have a fairly new Asus MB with an AMD 4.2 dc and five SATA II drives.
>
> My goal was to get Vista Business installed on one of the data drives and
> switch back and fourth using the boot drive selection in BIOS as opposed
> to the boot.ini file.
>
> Anyway, I set one of my data drives (no os) as the boot drive and booted
> the Vista media. It took quite a long time before setup said that it could
> not find suitable media. I tried offering it both dynamic and basic disks.
> It would not install. The setup program did see all the installed drives
> correctly.
>
> So is there anyway to install Vista on a NTFS partition? Most of my drives
> are 500GB.
>
> I support Vista at my office so I am not new to running it. I just wanted
> to see it running with a bit more hardware than the average office
> computer has.
>


The drive with the active partition is where the boot sector will get
installed regardless of which drive is set as the boot drive in the BIOS.
This method also won't hide other OS'. If you have XP installed you will
lose your Vista restore points when you boot to XP.

Without knowing the exact error message it sounds like you need to install a
driver for the SATA controller. Did you try loading a Vista driver?

--
Kerry Brown
Microsoft MVP - Shell/User
http://www.vistahelp.ca/phpBB2/