New Lynnfield Build: unable to install Vista

Hi,

I've recently put together a Lynnfield i7 build, but I've been having issues installing Windows Vista.

Whilst I'm able to install and run Linux (Ubuntu 9.04) absolutely fine, I'm not able to get Vista onto the box. I have a few MSDN windows disks available to install, so I'm getting the following responses from the copies I'd tried:

Vista Ultimate 32bit: Fails to begin the install, or fails to complete install.
Vista Ultimate 32bit (slipstreamed to SP1): As above.
Vista Ultimate 64bit: Installs fine, however attempting to apply any patches (SP1, nVidia drivers etc) the machine will hang.
Vista Enterprise 64bit with SP1: Fails during the expand files section.

Normally I'd suspect a hardware problem but I was able to install Ubuntu without a problem, and had the machine complete patching itself to the latest version and then sit through a number of benchmarks and burn in tests for a few hours. All of these completed without a problem.

I suspect that it's more likely to be a driver issue (vista did after all ship with some really flaky drivers), so I started to download drivers and put them on a memory stick to install, but so far I haven't had any luck. The nVidia drivers where my first port of call, but no joy there. That's about as far as I got because of time, however rather than spend hours downloading and experimenting I wanted to see if anyone else had had a similar issue?

Oh, and I'd thought about slipstreaming SP1 and SP2 onto a disk, but since my laptop is running 32bit vista I can't do that. I'm not quite at the point where I'm willing to flatten my laptop, install 64bit vista and then start a reverse integration or SP2

Thanks in Advance
~Daniel

H/W list (from memory, so apologies if wrong);
CPU: Intel Core i7 860, stock cooler (new)
RAM: 4GB Cosair XMS 1333 DDR3 9-9-9-24 (new)
GPU: XFX XXX nVidia GeForce 275 (new)
Mobo: ASRock P55 Extreme (new)
HDD: 2x32GB OCZ SDD (Raid0) System, 2x250GB Mixed Disk (Raid1) Data (note, data disk is currently unplugged)
PSU: Enermax Mod82+ 625W

Thanks for the reply Skora.

Memtest was another one that I'd not done because of time, however that's now happily running away on a single stick. I'll swap if this one passes the test.

I guess the only other thing to check out might be putting an old ATI card in and seeing if I can get windows up using that.

Yea, the RAID array works pretty nice. The one problem though is that even in RAID0, vista pretty much fills the array on it's own. Can't wait for the far smaller foot print of Win 7!

NP, Its nice to have a free program to tell you somethings wrong. Now if only I could get my car fixed this easy.