Vista - Problems with multiple hard drives

Hi,
I have an infuriating problem and would appreciate any help I can get.

Prior to upgrading to vista my hard drive set up was as follows:

1 x 80 gig (partitioned into 2, each with 32bit xp on) (Drive 1)
1 x 250 gig for storage (music photos etc...) (Drive 2)

All drives are sataII. This old setup was dual bootable, with one partition for music and one for games etc...

I've taken the plunge and got a full retail license of vista ultimate 64. To make things easier (orr so I thought!) I have bought a new 250 gig (Drive 3) with the idea of doing a clean install of vista 64 on this drive and simply replacing the old 80 gig xp drive. That way I can still access all of my stuff on Drive 2.

I started by unplugging the 2 old drives and plugging the new one into the same sata channel as the Drive 1. At this point the installation is a breaze with everything working fine.

When however after installation I plug Drive 2 back in all hell breaks loose! Vista takes about 10 minutes to boot (if at all) and when it does it is incredable slow and unstable, blue screening all of the time with hardware errors. Vista does detect Drive 2 and install drivers for it but it does not improve things. I have tried a clean install with drives 2 & 3 plugged in intially and this will not install!

Stranger still, I thought I might have a problem with my new drive so reverted back to xp with the new vista drive plugged into a third sata channel and the same problems occur in xp!

Essentiall, I am unable to mix drives. I can either have my existing xp drives (and data) or the new vista but not both.

Any help please!

Thanks,

Andrew

This situation, has now got even worse.

managed to boot up with Drive 2 & 3 with vista running at a snails pace. Went to drive manager and noticed Drive 2 was not set as active. searched the help files for the significance of this with no leads so thought i'd give it a try and activate this drive. This had an emmediate impact on the performance. Everything was running fast again, hoorar!

At this point I thought i'd fixed the problem, so tried a re-boot to make sure and also see if the boot time was back to normal. To my dismay, after this re-boot vista is now completely dead and will not boot. I have tried everything including safe mode, unplugging Drive 2, repair utility. The repair utility states it as un-recoverable.
Boot up error messages and blue screens keep denoting corrupted or missing registry entries. My only option seems to be another fresh install, but i don't see the point. This is my third fruitless install this week! all work fine and then get fatal problems adding the old drive in. Luckily I have my work laptop to still get online.

Please help,

Andrew