i was told by the hard drive manufacturer that it is a vista problem. if anyone else can confirm this let me know:
Here's a copy of my full explanation from another post:
I bought two 500 gig sata drives. In installed them as a 5th and 6th drive as back up and file storage. I wasn't able to see them in my computer so went into disk management and formatted and created drive letters. Then the drives/partition showed up. Rebooted and still everything looked great. Then I decided to just clone the OS onto my new sata, cloning was successful it booted up and the desktop showed up and then all of a sudden a prompt showed up saying that i had a pirated OS. Which that is impossible as i paid for the OS. I then had to reboot as for some reason i wasn't able to do certain things and now I wasn't able to boot up as it said that there was a corrupted .sys file. Well I wasn't a happy camper and am furious as now I can't access my drives.
So i was going to reinstall windows I tried setting up raid but for some reason the drive doesn't even show up in the bios, so i disabled the raid, now the drives show up in the bios, so i go to install windows and the drives are not showing up in the window where to install the drive.
I called my motherboard company and they said that it wasn't the motherboard, the, bios are up to date, i called wester digital and they said that it's a vista problem, so they told me to call microsoft, and of course microsoft won't help you unless you pay them. they make a tone of money but won't help you with an issue that shouldn't even be happening.
so right now as it stands the drives do show up in the bios but won't show up under the section to where to install the OS. Does anyone know why vista won't recognize my new sata drives?[/B][/B]