Vista Installation Issues, Headache after Headache

My first attempt to install vista turned out to be nothing but problem after
problem. I am installing on my main machine on a secondary hard drive that
has no other operating system on that secondary. When I tried to install
vista booting to the installation dvd I recieve a message when selecting
partition to install it on that dialog screen I recieved no partition meets
the requirments to accept the install. This is a IDE western digital formated
40 GB hard drive. I've tried reformating, repartitioning and reinstalling
with no success. I have even tried a different hard drive. So I attempted
the install from my XP pro OS and the installation would get to the expanding
files part and freeze or randomly reboot without continuing the installation.
After some research I found people were able to circumvent this problem with
installing vista from xp pro safe mode. So I did this and it was a success.
Once it rebooted I recieved a error message from the new vista boot manager
bootload.exe is corrupt. Once again I did research and found that if you do
a startup repair from the installation DVD it would solve this issue. Once
the startup repair completed I did a reboot and got another error message
from vista boot manager \boot\bcd cannot be found, unable to load vista. At
this point I no longer can select my XP Pro option so my computer is dead in
the water. I am not able to find any info on this \boot\bcd cannot be found
issue. Anybody have an suggestions or similar problem? I plan on doing that
boot\fixntfs -xp loader to get my xp pro installation back. But I would
still like to get vista running. Any suggestion would be greatly
appreciated. Thanks in advance.