Vista won't install on SATA hard drive.

I just built my new system, and this is my first time working with a SATA drive (a Western Digital WD3200AAKS), so I came here to make sure I'm not missing something really stupid. The system boots up fine, the bios sees and identifies the hard drive correctly, and it shows up as a master on the first IDE channel. The Vista installer is also able to see the drive, and lets me attempt to install on it. However, I consistently get errors right after the "Extracting Files" step reaches 100%. A couple different errors have occurred, but the most common one is the "Could not install offline locale information" error. I believe the problem to be the hard drive for 2 reasons:

1.) I also tried to install XP pro on the drive. After the first re-boot (when the "blue screen" installing finishes), the system got stuck in an infinite re-booting cycle.

2.) I popped in my old IDE hard drive, and Vista installed the first time with no problems.

I left the SATA drive connected, and can still see it in Vista. I formatted it overnight and am now running Vista's error checking tool to see if it spots anything. The confusing thing about all this is that almost everything indicates the drive is working properly...except when I'm trying to install Windows.

edit*

My best estimate is that it did take over an hour to format the drive (which is why I left it overnight). Is this normal for a 320GB SATA drive?