Cannot install vista on RAID 5 array

Does the mobo have a driver utility to make an installer for Windows?

Its an ASUS P5k-E, i don't know about that, I tried loading the drivers, I did an emulated floppy to make the driver bootdisk and copied it to a usb drive, loaded the driver in vista install and it still wouldn't allow. Formatting or create new partition doesn't help either.

I have the RAID splitting 3 160 GB drives into an 80 and a 240.

I cannot install on either

You would need the raid drivers and specify them during initial set-up by hitting F6

initial set up of vista?

How do I choose them?

The RAID array will not be understood by the Vista installer, thus you need to provide a piece of software to provide understanding.  The software is most-likely on your mobo's CD/DVD-ROM or can be obtained from the manufacturer's web-site.  The software will either create a floppy, or a package that can be placed on a USB thumb-drive.  During the Vista installer, there is an option to select the destination HDD.  If no HDD or volume is found, then you can load software and re-try that portion of sdetup.

That is what you need to do.

i tried that and I selected the driver that was provided by the diskmaker utility but it still would not take

How did you provide the driver?

I made a virtual floppy drive and I used the make disk utility then I copied all to the root of a USB drive and I selected the driver that showed UP (ICH9R) RAID in the Vista install when I did load driver

Have tried just copying the driver to a USB thumb-drive?

its in a cat file

cab file?

Then the contents must be extracted to a non-compressed directory.

Doubtful, the installer copies many of the files it needs to RAM, then to a pagefile.  It could be the driver file was kept on that pagefile, which is not cleared on reboot.