Vista - Gone!

I recently built a new system with 3.0 ghz core 2 duo. Asus mother board with 8 gigs of ddr2 gskill ram. I have 512 m BFG geforce 8800 GTS video card and a SAMSUNG Spinpoint F1 HD103UJ 1TB 7200 RPM 32MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive. It is in a cool master case with a 650 w psu.

I put everything together and installed Vista 64bit. I had antivirus, all the drivers, and office installed. Everything was working well for 2 days. Yesterday I come home from work and start it up and it says … missing operating system.

I restarted it… same thing. I check the cords on the drive and replaced the sata connector with a new one just in case…. I still get the same message. When I look in the bios it displays the Samsung hard drive like everything is normal.

I started the reinstall process with windows vista 64 bit and after it restats from the first time is comes up with an error message or a blue screen of death that tells me that it can not complete the install something is corrupted, or just a stack dump.

I then deleted the partition on the drive and reformatted and tried to install vista again and I am getting the same error after the first time it restarts.

Anyone have any ideas on what could be going on? I am currently running a scan on the drive looking for any bad sectors. Could the hard drive be bad? What should be my next step in trouble shooting this problem?

While you're trying to track down the problem if you're OCing, drop all your settings back to default and see if anything changes, if it doesn't change anything continue to run default settings until you get this problem resolved, then go back to OCing, that is if you are OCing.

Sometimes memory timings or settings can blow you out of the park with 8G.