Well, i got my Vista installed on the new hard drive, guess one of the SATA cables finally got the mobo to recognize it, but here's the strange part.
After windows installed I booted up my mobo's driver CD, it installed properly, and went through a few restarts. After that was finish I proceeded to install my graphics card (Nvidia Geforce 9800GTX) drivers, it installed succesfully, and when it was finished I proceeded to change the settings to my monitor's native resolution (1440x900) so everything wasn't scrunched up. To my dismay I found that the monitor went black after the resolution was set to that, and it revered back to its scrunched up size after the 10 second "would you like to accept these changes?" screen.
I then went to the Nvidia website and downloaded the newest drivers for my video card hoping it would fix it. The download finished and I ran the drivers, it was successful and my computer restarted, it loaded into my desktop with my monitors native resolution, and after about 15 seconds the monitor flickered and went black exactly like my past problem.
I tried restarting and i was hit with the exact same 100% identical problem. I thought it might have been the graphics card, but I tried putting my friends card which was practically identical to mine (both 9800GTX) into my system a few days back when i was testing some parts and it had the same black screen. We also tested 4 different monitors and had the same problem. My Bios detects my 4 gigs of ram, and I don't think think my pc can even start without my processor, so it just leads me to believe its all the motherboards fault.
So, whats your input before i order a new mobo off Newegg tonight?
Sorry for the wall of text.