alright i was going to give vista a try...but i cannot get past the setup screen... vista is complaining about the need for a primary IDE channel. what does it want from me? I am installing vista on a older dell system (that still meets min vista requirements).

Which screen the message does display?

Does the message display when you enter the partition selection screen?

And what your computer's hardware is?

(May I know the chipset of your mainboard and model of it?)

well it is not an error message pop-up. it is at the screen which allows you to choose what hard drive to install vista on. i have 3 drives and 1 of them has a partition on it. is indicates that a primary IDE Channel is missing for all the drives and allows me to search my hard drive for the driver. i downloaded the driver for my controller but when i tried to install it everything went find fine and vista went through the install process. however after it appeared to install it went back to the screen asking me to choose a hard drive to install vista and again all the drives where missing the primary IDE Channel...

its a p45 chipset. i have actually installed the beta version of vista on this same system years ago with no issues.

Have you tried removing the partition on the drive and recreating it?

Make sure you're running the Vista install outside of an OS (at boot.)