I had a similar problem that was happening with my computer. What was
happening was, Vista would install, then after reboot it would say that the
install was uinsuccessful and that I needed to reinstall (to no avail).
Finally what I ended up doing was isolating the problem to a driver issue
with my SATA controller... I could either disable SATA altogether in BIOS
for the install, and install Vista on an old school ATA drive, and then
re-enable after the install; or if you poke around in the installer, you
should see an option to load drivers. Use this to load the driver that came
with your motherboard for the SATA controller, or better yet use the updated
drivers you downloaded off the internet from your manufacturer's website and
burnt to a CD.
Rember, if you decide to try burning a cd, don't expect the .exe installer
to load the driver for you. Those need to be extracted using something like
WinRar (
www.rarsoft.com) into a directory, because the load drivers thing
will want an .ini file and .dlls.
Lastly my motherboard is an evga 580i AMD, incase you are wondering.
Hope this helps.