vista will not install/boot

Hi, my specs are: Q6600 Asus P5N-E SLI 650i Samsung 500gb HD Innovision 3D 8600GTS 256MB GDDR3 OCZ 2Gb PC2-6400 DDR2-800 Every time I try to install Vista Ultimate on this machine it seems to hang on "completing installation", I've left it for about 7 hours and its still stuck at this point, which obviously isn't supposed to happen. I tried another hard drive, and the exact same thing happened. Tried installing again with different sticks of memory, same result again. So I installed Vista on the HD on another computer which worked fine then put it in to my new rig. It got to just after the loading bar screen then just restarted the computer in an endless cycle. I tried installing XP to see if there was any difference and guess what? It worked fine. So far I am pretty stumped. Anyone got any ideas?

super_neil, First of all, unless you have the SAME motherboard, installing Visa on your hard drive using a DIFFERENT PC won't work when you connect that hard drive to the PC you're having issues with as the hardware is likely different. Questions? Have you successfully installed/run any other Operating Systems on this hardware before? Are you overclocking this PC? Have you tried setting the offending PC's motherboard BIOS settings to their defaults? Have you looked on the Motherboard's MFG support site to see if there are any new BIOS updates and/or Windows Vista specific drivers available? If you're able to install Vista on that SAME hard drive using a different PC/Motherboard, than the DRIVE is not the culprit. I would first look at the BIOS and BIOS settings on the offending motherboard. Perhaps there's a physical jumper on that motherboard that's not set right. Everything points to the motherboard, its BIOS or VISTA specific settings/drivers. It may be that there's a problem with this motherboard, in which it may need to be replaced. Hope this helps.

super_neil,

Check out the following thread:

http://www.hardwareanalysis.com/content/topic/66695/

It contains several post from user's who are having the SAME issue as you are with this particular ASUS Motherboard. It seems that there are BIOS versions for this board to avoid. Read through the entire thread and you should be able to resolve your Vista installation issues. It seems to be more a compatibility with Vista than any hardware or BIOS issues with your ASUS Motherboard.

- John