Vista not installing to SATA drive

I just recently ditched an IDE drive in my PC in order to lower the total temperature in my rig. Unfortunately this drive was where Vista was installed. I had two SATA drives that I wanted to use, one for my linux install and one for Vista. My Ubuntu linux install is on my 1TB disk that installed just fine, and the drive that was to be used for Vista was formatted and partitioned as NTFS. I've dual-booted using a similar setup before, but not with Vista on SATA. When the Vista install runs and I get to the point of choosing a drive it states it cannot use the selected drive, a 160gb western digital WD-1600JS. It doesnt even recognize it as being NTFS, even after using G-parted to partition the drive. I ran the drivepart command line utility in Vista (shift+F10 on partition screen), but it never quite finished. I read that I may need to preload drivers during this portion of the installation in order to get Vista to install on a SATA drive, but I have found conflicting reports of Vista installing on SATA drives. Some say it works w/o the drivers. After searching the Western Digital site for such drivers i'm coming up short. Right now im trying to determine if I can have my BIOS read the SATA drive as a PATA, and thus somehow get around the problem that Vista may not be installing on the drive because it see's it as SATA and can't install. In any case im coming up against a wall, and I'd hate to reinstall my IDE drive again just to run Vista. Any help would be apprecated.

Hello devosion,

Welcome to Vista Forums.

Have you gone into the bios and activated the second sata port. I had to do this when I added a second sata drive.

Hope this helps.

Gary