Vista Install failing with Maxtor Hard Drive - very frustrated.

Sorry you're having trouble with the drive. I looked up that drive by the
model number you gave and it is not a SATA drive so I don't think you need
any drivers for it. Unless maybe you have it connected to an add-in
controller card. If it is plugged into your motherboard's ide port you
shouldn't have to provide a driver.

Maybe the problem you are having is with one of the partitions. I did
install Vista on a formatted NTFS partition and not over the top of an
exisiting XP operating system.

I had a 250gb (the entire drive) installation of XP Pro.
I did a clean install of XP and did a quick format (losing everything in the
process).
I made two partitions during the XP install: C: and D:
I then installed XP Pro on the C: partition.
From my XP on C: I inserted the Vista DVD supplied by MS and let the
installer take over.
I did do the "custom" install which let me choose D: as the target drive to
install Vista on.

That should work for you also. If you want to keep one of the XPs that you
have, you may want to format the other one; I can't tell from what you wrote
if you still have XP on both partitions.

It doesn't bother me to format and reload the operating systems since I
don't care if I lose anything on this computer. You may not want to do that
with yours.

I'm not an expert by any means, just a hobbyist home user, so you may want
to keep that in mind.