Anyone care to help me out..New hard drive loading Vista

Hi,
I have a HP desktop with vista 64. I seem to blow through Hard drives often. No idea why.
Anyhow, I am replacing the computer with a new 2.0 TB hard drive. When I first got the computer I made the three disk recovery. I have used before to re-install windows vista and it works like a charm. This time having no such luck. I have tried doing research and trying different things.

after the third disk, it restarts and says, windows set up can not configure windows on this computers hardware. I have tried a few times.

I plugged the new hard drive into a laptop and it said the partition with the factory image and it had another partition with say 48GB. I read that sometimes DVD disks can not format such a large drive and that could be the issue, so I download (on the laptop) a free partition program and wiped out everything except that factory image. The the hard drive showed the factory image partition and the 1.88 TB it should. Plugged back into the desktop. Still no luck.

I have read alot about AF hard drives and needing to load a driver, but HP says vista 64 should not need that. Even if it does, I do not know how to load it. There is no mention in the disks to load a driver. Can this be pre-loaded onto the hard drive when connected into the working laptop?

I have tried RAID, AHCI, and IDE and get same error for all three...

Any ideas or input?

I wonder what would happen if you partitioned the new drive to have the C: drive something like 100 Gb. It could be a hardware problem from the standpoint that the BIOS or Vista can't handle the full 2 Tb for installation purposes.

I installed OEM Vista on a 1 Tb drive without issue.

Just an idea.

Hmm, good possibility. The last hard drive I used that worked well was only 1 TB and it worked perfectly. I guess my next question would be if I create a 100 partition, when I install the disks it creates another partition automatically. Will that affect the partition I created?