Thank you kindly for the help.

The system is set to boot from cd. I get as far as choosing the partition to place Vista on and the when the screen comes up saying "that is al the info we need for now" it looks like it wants to start and then the error comes up.

I had a hunch that it might need the RAID driver on the s/w side so I might have to do a vlite install. I'm just hoping I don't have to wipe off my data partition for some weird reason, unless you think that the whole disc structure right now is gone.

The RAID is set in the BIOS as it reports it as a healthy array.

I will play around more when I get home from work.

In the future, how would you have handled this before deleting the partitions? Is there a better way to recover the space taken by the XP partition?