Good luck. I don't know much about X38 issues with Vista.
I've done a couple installs on P35 boards and had some problems relating to BIOS settings or the way I had my hard drives partitioned. Vista has a buggy / picky installer that gave me hours of problems to get the install started even on a system I had JUST clean installed XP SP2 on, so Vista's installer is a lot worse in ways than XP's.
Update the BIOS to the latest reputable one, clear the BIOS settings to factory defaults and then change only the needed ones for a start. Consider either IDE mode or AHCI mode as you have been, one or both should work. Consider limiting the DMA mode to PIO4 if you're stumped and having disc I/O errors but usually it wouldn't be a problem.
Be careful with "cable select" or getting parallel IDE cables on backwards (motherboard end on drive end) in any case. Make sure if you have "master" jumpered on a twin set of drives that the other one is "slave" or if it is a single drive that "master" doesn't really mean "this is the master and I am expecting a slave drive to be present also" in which case no jumper or whatever may be the right setting for a lone drive.
Try to get a Vista + SP1 already integrated together ISO image to install from, it might just work a lot better than Vista original release since you're having problems.
For the "clean install" with the upgrade disc, AFAIK there's an easier way to do it,
just don't enter your key during the install as you've already heard, pick the right edition to install, install it... Then when you're done and installed and updated to SP1 and it's all working you can do this with only having to install ONCE:
START CMD.EXE as Administrator or
RUN AS ADMINISTRATOR CMD.EXE
for a command shell and type at the shell prompt:
slmgr -ipk xxxxx-xxxxx-xxxxx-xxxxx-xxxxx
where xxxx-xxxx-..... is your key.
then after a while it should pop up a dialog telling you it accepted the key, then
slmgr -ato
to activate vista online immediately via the internet using your currently entered key.
Or alternatively:
slmgr -dli
to show your system product ID digits which you can then input in the phone system with a phone call to activate over the telephone... or alternatively I imagine you can use the GUI "activate windows" thing to get it to show you how to activate over the phone once you have the key in there .....then..
slmgr -atp your-telephone-response-confirmation-id
to enter in the activation code you get back over the activation phone call
You can also do from an admin command prompt:
slmgr -rearm
which resets your grace period before you have to activate windows back to exactly 30 days from the current day when you give the command; you can do that up to three times, so if you wait just under 30 days, rearm, wait another 30 days, rearm, etc. that'll give you a few months before you have to activate in case you're still reconfiguring / testing your system and software and don't have it all finalized for a while.
http://news.softpedia.com/news...se-Manager-44976.shtml
Originally posted by: mismajor99
Thanks for the help QuixticOne, I'll give this a try in the morning. I know for a fact that Vista detects my USB drive so that shouldn't be a problem. BTW, I'm running the Upgrade version of Vista btw, but I'm doing the workaround where you can install a full copy , then install the upgrade and activate. Not sure if you're familiar with the method.
Also, Is there a known issue with the X38 chipset and Vista, or possibly the latest bios from ASUS that I've upgraded too? I've been hearing there a few issues with my board that I wasn't aware of.