Installation Failed at Extracting Files - rollback failed dismally

Hi, was wondering if anyone has seen/worked around this problem.
I have already sent a bug report to M$ but don't expect to hear from em soon
as im sure they get thousands.
This might be a bit of a bible, but i want to be thorough.

System:
Athlon XP4000
ASUS A8N - E M/B (Nforce 4 ultra, latest bios)
NV GF6800 GFX card (XFX)
Corsair XMS 2048MB (2-3-3-6)
1x 160GB SATA (primary boot drive, single partition, NTFS c:\)
2x 80GB PATA (RAID 0 - 2 partitions, 130GB NTFS and 30GB NTFS d:\, h:\)
Latest Nvidia drivers for Vista (still in beta)
Plenty of other hardware, but i dont think it matters in this instance.

I attempted to install vista to h:\.
1st run i mounted the image in daemon tools, 2nd run I ran from a dvd. The
ISO was downloaded from microsoft and i verified the MD5 as correct before
starting.

Ran the installer from within XP, allowed it to search for updates (it found
1, a 276? kb file but did not say what it was)
First stage completed and system rebooted to vista.
Commenced extracting files, first time failed at 94%, second time failed
also but i was not in the room so not sure how far it got. At this point it
tried to roll back installation.
On reboot, vista ran chkdsk on h:\ and found heaps of errors, it then
proceded to continue with rollback but eventually hung (i let it go for an
hour to be sure)and i had to do a hard reset.
chkdsk ran again on h:\ and more errors found, rollback continued and hung
again.
chkdsk ran again on h:\ and more errors again, this time installer hung on a
BSOD with 'BAD_POOL_CALLER' as the error.
chkdsk ran again, but this time flagged errors on both d:\ and h:\,
installer eventually opened with a command window and that was it.

I had to manually fix the xp boot sector from my xp installation disk to
remove the bootloader and then manually clean up all of the junk on c, d and
h drives.

On my second attempt things were the same to start with but got worse,
chkdsk hung on the vista rollback.. no worries i thought, maybe it is buggy,
the xp version will fix it... firstly my d partition was inaccessible under
XP ('drive not ready' was the error), and chkdsk would not run from inside XP
on that drive. So i allowed XP to do a startup scan, which hung as well when
fixing up a file index. 6 reboots and 5 hang's later i am back up to normal.
It looks like Vista really screwed up the index tables on both h:\ and d:\
(lucky it didnt kill c:\...)

I have verified the entire RAID array and there are no bad sectors or other
problems. I have run memtest86 overnight with no memory problems. I have
relaxed the memory timings alot in bios between first and second attempts.
I suspect it has something to do with my raid setup but cannot be sure as i
do not have a reliable way to test without using the array (i am not happy
breaking up the partition that c:\ is currently on as i want vista on a
totally sepparate HDD)

I would really like to get vista up and running to have a look at it, but
seeing as the last install nearly killed a drive that it should not even have
placed files on i am a little hesitant as i do not have the time to do a full
replacement of XP and all of my backups if something goes really wrong the
next time.

Any suggestions? Anyone else suffered this also and beat it? I was
considering unplugging my SATA HDD before trying to install vista again (to
protect xp installation) but due to my raid setup i need to launch the vista
installer from XP to load the raid drivers (can't seem to get it to do this
from the bootloader installation)

Thanks in advance.