Vista will install on one machine, but not the other

I'm attempting a fresh install of Home Premium x64 on my machine. I have done this successfully 3 times in the past. It has already been running this same OS. To make sure I did not majorly screw up my already operating install, I decided to perform the fresh install on a separate HDD. This new HDD was formatted and is 80GB. It performed the entire instillation, rebooted the appropriate amount of times, it showed the "preparing your computer for first boot" screen. and even showed the widows vista in plain white text with the green loading bar beneath. It did not get past the green loading bar. Therefore, it did not get to the root user setup process. After the green loading bar was up for a much longer than normal time, it would automatically reboot, and go through the same process. I tried booting it in safe mode with no luck.

I thought maybe it was a bad install so I tried to re-re-installed it. Same result. I thought maybe the disk was dirty so I cleaned it and tried again. Same result. I thought maybe it was a bad HDD. So I got a different 300GB HDD, formatted it, and performed the instillation. Same result.

I decided to run the instillation on a completely different machine, a Sony VGn-S260 laptop. WA-LA! The instillation was successful. Of course, it was not activated. It was in the 30-day trial phase.

I'm guessing this is some kind of hardware issue, but I'm not sure. Anyone have any ideas? Any help is appreciated! Thanks in advanced!

Edit:
Specs:
Dell 530s
4GB DDR2 RAM
Home Premium x64
Core 2 Duo E8600 @ 3.33GHz