P5LD2, STOP error on vista install

Hello, i've got here a P5LD2 board, which (apparently) has issues stemming from its use of the IT8211 controller for its IDE ports.

The board has 3 PATA ports, two red ones, grouped together on one side of the board, and one blue, off by itself on another side.

While installing XP, i was forced to move my cd-rom and harddisk to different ports (CD connected to the blue one, PRI IDE, and HD connected to the lower red one , PRI EIDE), and on top of that, hit F6 during the first part of the install and give it a driver, so that it would not crash later with a 0x0000007b stop error.

Anyways, i'm up to installing vista now, and i've formatted my HD. So, it boots up fine, and sees my HD without requiring any drivers this time. Good, so i continue, system reboots, vista attempts to start from the HD... and STOP 0x0000007b.

Tried the same thing while giving it the XP drivers that i've used before, with the same result.

Apparently it's failing to see the HD, even though it's booted from it?

I've checked the usual suspects, i.e. memory (memtest86 shows all good), PSU (known good, and tried a new one for kicks), HD's themselves (work fine in other machine).


Any ideas here?