vista installation issues headache after headache

My first attempt to install vista turned out to be nothing but problem after problem. I am installing on my main machine on a secondary hard drive that has no other operating system on that secondary. When I tried to install vista booting to the installation dvd I recieve a message when selecting partition to install it on that dialog screen I recieved no partition meets the requirments to accept the install. This is a IDE western digital formated 40 GB hard drive. I've tried reformating, repartitioning and reinstalling with no success. I have even tried a different hard drive. So I attempted the install from my XP pro OS and the installation would get to the expanding files part and freeze or randomly reboot without continuing the installation. After some research I found people were able to circumvent this problem with installing vista from xp pro safe mode. So I did this and it was a success. Once it rebooted I recieved a error message from the new vista boot manager bootload.exe is corrupt. Once again I did research and found that if you do a startup repair from the installation DVD it would solve this issue. Once the startup repair completed I did a reboot and got another error message from vista boot manager \boot\bcd cannot be found, unable to load vista. At this point I no longer can select my XP Pro option so my computer is dead in the water. I am not able to find any info on this \boot\bcd cannot be found issue. Anybody have an suggestions or similar problem? I plan on doing that boot\fixntfs -xp loader to get my xp pro installation back. But I would still like to get vista running. Any suggestion would be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance.