marshallpenguin

Alright. It worked. I'm just glad to finally have it installing! Thanks for your help.

Well, I'm trying it. I'll post here how it works out. To be a bit more verbose about it in case it all works out and this can help someone: I changed my bios settings to use AHCI and that didn't work. Although the vista setup DID finally recognize the drivers I got off of asus's site. So I tried setting it to RAID (it was just SATA at first). Windows Vista did NOT recognize the disk drive that time until after I loaded the AHCI/RAID driver. So this leads me to believe that, and the windows help page mentions this as a possible solution, that a HDD wipe IS needed. Because vista does detect the HDD and can format/partition etc - it just won't install on to it. Hopefully this will work. I'm not exactly thrilled that I have to wipe my HDD but thankfully Linux is dead simple to install (I pop the cd in and the full OS runs!)

I don't like that idea. NEXT!!! I really don't want to do that (I'm actually a linux user it's just that I need vista for testing and packaging software I write) but I will if I have to. So are you absolutely sure that that is what needs to be done? I do have two partitions on my HDD one of which IS formatted to ntfs. Are you sure when you did it it wasn't because your partitions were fat32 (Sorry for not trusting you but I'd really rather not wipe my hdd, and if I do it would be very VERY frustrating if vista still didn't install). Thank you very much for your reply! Joey

Oh, I also tried the drivers with the description: "AMD AHCI Compatible RAID Controller Driver V3.1.1540.10 for Windows 32/64bit Vista." But that didn't work either.

I have tried for several hours to get vista to work with my hard drive but to no avail. I created a partition and formatted it but when I try to install it it says "Windows is unable to find a system volume that meets its criteria for installation": unhelpful resolutions on microsofts site: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/927520 (only difference is that I CAN select and format it.) I have the ASUS M3A78-EMH HDMI and a SATA HD. I tried getting the drivers from asus's site that had the description: "Make ATI RAID/AHCI Vista32 Driver for Windows Vista 32bit&Vista 64bit" But I couldn't find any drivers in that download. I also tried using the DriveMaker exe that was on the drivers cd that came with the motherboard,,, but evidently you need a floppy disk drive in order to use it (how dumb is that?) and it so happens that I didn't order one of those with my computer As I said I've spent hours trying to get this to work. I'm posting this here in high hopes that someone will know the solution. If not I plan on getting na IDE hard drive which I'd really rather not do as I like my large, fast and silent SATA hard drive. I hope someone can help me! Thanks! Joey