Getting depressed at this stage, Vista intallation help required!

[DarthRevan]

My Spec:
Intel E6600
Gigabyte GA_P35_DQ6
GeForce 8800 GTS OC2 640MB
GeIL 2GB
Samsung SpinPoint 500GB SATA-II
Samsung SH-183LBEBN DVD±RW

Ok so I’ll start from the beginning, got the whole thing up and running and went to install Windows Vista Home Premium.

Couldn’t find my hard drive, so I checked in my BIOS and both hard drive and DVD drive were visible and detected.

Have tried everything to get this installed but now its just killing me that I have my first home made rig and I cant even get Vista installed, it will be out of date by the time I do at this rate.

What I think I need is
1. A clear indication of where I should connect the HDD to the Mobo i.e. orange or purple and what position it should be connected i.e. 0, 1, 2, etc
I’ve read about Intel controllers and gigabyte ones but I can’t identify which is which.

2. Same as the above but now dealing with DVD drive as I fear I might have it in the wrong place.

3. The location of the drivers for this mother board, the ones I have downloaded from the gigabyte site windows doesn’t recognise them as driver files.

4. If the correct drivers don’t work a detailed bios setup as to how to make the Sata 2 drive think its an IDE drive as some people have had success going down that route.

I have read about this problem everywhere on the net and it seems its pretty common, yet nobodies’ solution that I have followed has worked for me. It seems fairly ridiculous that for such a common problem none of the companies involved have done anything to fix it from what ive seen.

My Mac using housemates are beginning to laugh at me for building my own pc saying that im just reinforcing the Mac vs. PC ads. God I can’t wait to show them!

So please guys if anybody could give me a step by step guide to solving this problem or a link to where someone has gone through it I would be very appreciative.

 

[Teaf]

When I installed my Vista, I could only get it set up when I set the Sata drives in BIOS to AHCI mode. Also only when the drives were on the orange slots, not the purple ones. Purple ones required a driver and it just couldn't get the driver to install on the Vista setup, so I went with the orange slots.

I've yet to try installing the driver through Vista when I had it up and running, then switching it over the purple ports, but it may work.

 

[DarthRevan]

Tried that just there, it didnt work. same problem. all drives are recognised in bios but vista never does. pulling my hair out as it seems no one has had this problem solved out there.

i have tried to create the driver disk through DOS when you get that option to in the vista setup using the "cd bootdrv" method as decribed by the gigabyte manual. yet it said that the menu file was the wrong type for vista install.

none of the .exe files i have downloaded from gigabyte have worked they wont install anywhere and vista certainly doesnt see them as drivers.

i just dont know where to go from here.....

please has anyone any thoughts...

 

[stickroad]

Do you have 2 Hard Drives? Just thinking if you did, set them in a Raid config and then see if Vista see`s them, not the most conventional way but if you can get them working for the time being. Maybe you will find a fix further down the line.