Vistal Install with GA-p35-ds3r SATA issues

Help!

Sorry for the double post here and in the motherboard section, but I'm out of ideas.

I've just completed a new build with the following specs:

Q6600
Gigabyte GA-P35-DS3R Rev. 2.1
2 x 2GB Mushkin HP-6400 DDR2-800 RAM
500GB Samsung SpinPont HD501LJ SATA Hard Drive
EVGA 8800GTS 512MB Video Card
Samsung SATA SH-203N CD/DVD Burner
Vista Home Premium - OEM
Zalman 9500LED CPU Cooler

I assembled everything, and it booted on the first try, so I had high hopes... until I started installing Vista.

On the first attempt, I did not install any SATA drivers, but I formatted/partitioned the new drive and proceeded with the install. Everything went fine, until after the reboot. Vista got to the "Completing Installation" section. After a few minutes the screen went blank, except for the mouse cursor which was frozen in place. This was repeatable. I had read that Vista doesn't like 4GB on install, so I removed one of the sticks, same result.

After some research on the internet, it seems to point to a lack of SATA drivers that causes Vista to hang. So I got the latest drivers from Gigabyte's website and put them on a USB drive. However Vista detected no compatable drivers - when I unchecked "Hide incompatable drivers" they appeared. So I tried using the ICH9R and ICH9 drivers on seperate installs (the manual says to use ICH9 with 1 drive, I am not RAIDing anything). Same result.

I then poked around in the BIOS and noticed that RAID and ACHI were disabled - so I turned on ACHI and tried to install again. This time Vista gives me an error message saying that my hardware may not be able to access the harddrive. I figured this was because the driver was not loaded, so I went to the Load Drivers screen again, and it actually detected the ICH9 drivers. The first time it would not install correctly (gave me an error), and it would not let me format/partition/install on the hard drive - I got an error saying I can't access the drive. So I redownloaded the drivers and tried again. This time it allowed me to install the driver, but I still couldn't format/partition/install on the hard drive.

So am I missing something here? Is there something I need to set in the BIOS? Did anyone get Vista to install on their GA-P35-DS3R board? Any help would be appreciated.