I had this same problem a few years back with a new home build that did not recognize the hard drive.
What I did was download the driver that came with the motherboard on a flopy.
Had to put a flopy drive in the computer to do this.
You should be able to do the same with flash memory to install in the screen with the bios.
Been a while so anyone feel free to correct me.
On the start of installation of the operating system it will ask you to install sata drivers.
Once this is done your system will recognize the drive and things will progress normally.
This was with XP, not sure about vista as it may have this already in it.
I am not very computer smart but if I can do it anyone can.
But I will agree Vista should be left alone and trashed.
I bought WDTV from Best buy and the DVD converter has so many problems running Vista, on XP it runs perfect.
As many other items, when you call microsoft about this they blame the manufacturers for not keeping up with the new operating systems and you speak with someone from India with English that is almost impossible to understand.
Yet they think they can solve the problem, ha ha, which they dont have a clue, found most of my issues were solved by google search and people posting the way to correct it.
Last edited by Earl; 23rd August 2009 at 18:55.