Finally got vista installed, but the funny thing is i didnt do anything different.
I had the first half on my 74gig raptor for xp, then the last half broken into 3 pieces - 15g for Ubuntu, 7gig a swap partition, then a free 7 gigs...
Installed vista on the last partition and it worked...
Basically doing not what they recommend to do - to have all the os's up the front of the partition blocks.
Once it was in (in the small 7 gig space) i had to delete the middle 2, and resize vista to take over....
Now ive got 30gig fer xp, and 30 for vista