RC2 Install Experience

My PC is an Abit NF7 S2G which has an NVidia nForce2 Ultra 400
chipset.
I have 2x 256MB Ballistix Memory modules set as Dual channel giving
512MB at 400
I have an FX5900 NVidia Graphics card, 2x PATA HDD, 2xDVD drives and
1xSATA.
On the primary IDE drive I have WINXP and on the SATA just data.
I purchased a Hitachi 320GB drive to fit as IDE slave, partitioned it
from WINXP to 105/100/100 and installed Vista RC2 on the first
partition starting the install from within WINXP in order to preserve
the Disk partition numbering, (I believe that is so?).
I have installed three times onto this drive and the first time the
install failed at the point when it was about to boot into windows to
set up Date & time.
I couldn't get anywhere so I installed again over the previous Vista.
The second time it failed to come up after rebooting from setting date
and time but after entering Safe Boot it came up normally and appeared
to work for a few minutes before totally locking up after trying to
start Media Center.
Safe Boot would not reliably start on this occasion as well.
The third time it seemed to go well and I did nothing more after
getting to the desktop but set the security options and try a reboot.
It failed to come up, sticking, as with the second attempt, at the
green bars before the Vista spash backdrop.
It would enter Safe Mode though, so I took a look at the event log.
It was full of "Driver detected a controller error on
\Device\Ide\IdePort0 Event 11" errors.
My first thought was a duff new drive or bad IDE cable.
I booted into WINXP and ran disk diags on the Vista partition choosing
repair options.
It finished OK.
I copied a 8.6GB file to and from anothe partition on the same drive
and there were no errors in the WINXP event log.
I suspect that the Vista IDE driver for this chipset is at fault.
Any comments/suggestions?

--
regards

Madden