New Build problems (sigh)

[Milehigh]

Over the last two days, I installed a Gigabyte X58A-UD3R with an I7-920 and a triple channel G Skill 6 gig kit with a Hypercooler 212 plus on the CPU into my existing Antec P180 case with Corsair 620 PS & EVGA GTX 260 vid card.. I've had nothing but problems, and am frustrated beyond belief!

To start, it had a hard time recognizing all the memory, most of the early time, the memory test only showed 4 gig, but flashing the BIOS seems to somewhat have fixed the problem. I also configured two existing Seagate 320 gig drives which had previously been in a RAID 1 array into the same configuration on the new motherboard. They seemed to be fine, but now one of the drives died and it appears they no longer sell those drives.

Also yesterday, I had multiple BSOD's which seem to have disappeared with the BIOS flash, which is a good thing.

My bigger issue seems to be with Windows Update, either it doesn't download updates or it fails. I have an OEM version of Vista 64 and had to install that first in order to use my Retail Win 7 upgrade version, but Win 7 won't upgrade until I get to at least Vista SP1. At this point I'm still on Vista struggling with Win Update...

I should mention this is all at stock speeds and I can't even consider an OC until I get things stable. Currently, the Intel ICH10R SATA raid software is saying (and BIOS RAID screen) that I have a degraded RAID due to one drive being down.

Does anyone have any suggestions on things I can look at to troubleshoot my problems? Do I scrap all my installs to this point and do a hard format on the Seagate drives? To my credit, I have all my stuff backed up on an internal 450 gig WD drive and a 1 terabyte WD external drive... I just want to get to a point where I can install Win7 and hope newer drivers solve some issues....

Thanks for any advice to one frustrated upgrader

 

[Dangman]

Reformat and reinstall. The degradation of the RAID array may have had something to do with the inability for Vista to update.

In addition, see if you can download manually Vista SP1.

 

[Milehigh]

After a bit of time on MS's site, I can't seem to find SP1 64 bit... I'll try again, would you think the drive truly bit the dust, or a re-format might help?

Reformat and reinstall. The degradation of the RAID array may have had something to do with the inability for Vista to update.

In addition, see if you can download manually Vista SP1.

 

[Dangman]

After a bit of time on MS's site, I can't seem to find SP1 64 bit... I'll try again, would you think the drive truly bit the dust, or a re-format might help?

Try the reformat and see what happens.

 

[Milehigh]

Well, I blew off the raid array at this point and am formatting the good drive. Once I'm at a place where I'm stable, I'll re-add the drive and see if it is recoverable. I also removed 4 of the 6 gigs of memory, just one 2 gig stick until is appears stabilized. The way it is acting, I'm suspecting either a motherboard issue or a memory issue...