Puncrawq

System Specs:
Asus M2N-E MB
AMD XP 6000+ 64 CPU
4gb Patriot DDR 2 (two 2gb sticks)
Geforce 8500gt 512mb DDR 2 VGA
2 case fans, 1 graphics card pci vent fan,
500w PS with sata connections (even though non are needed just yet)
dvd rom (samsung 18x)
cd burner (cant remember specs right now)
no floppy drive
500 gb seagate barracude hdd


Brand new system just built it. Trying to get past hte last hurdle.

Problem :
after installing vista and foramting the new drive wich only had windows me, then xp on it before (all fresh installs) vista loads and on the last reboot vista goes to start for hte first time and it hangs up gives the bsod real quick does a memory dump real fast and reboots. just does it over and over again.

I tried booting from the vista dvd and using the repair feature to no avail. just reports a "failure during setup" and offered no codes or other reasons. As it is a new fresh system I can not print screen the message. a couple of things that happened prior were

the HDD registered 500gb with windows ME then my sick for windows xp came in the mail so I installed that and the HDD now read at 372gb so then i learned xp doesnt support 4gb ram so i bought vista and decided i might as well build my dream computer while i had the time and money. so in comes vista premium 64 i load it still only read the HDD at 372gb but it loaded correctly read the memory fine everything was good except the HDD not reading correctly. so I reload xp thinking i should format the drive again and maybe it would see the remaining space but to no avail i reloaded vista and now im getting the error mentioned above. Did I fry the HDD? It doesnt seem to be the VGA at least to me it seems uncharacteristic but I could be wrong...any ideas?