Here is a problem I encountered myself and have seen half a dozen other people having too. It is with trying to reinstall Vista from a recovery DVD(s) that was burnt from the recovery partition. As soon as one tries to install to a new disk or to a partition that is different (due to repartitioning) than the original OS partition, the installation does not work. The installation either does not complete and gets stuck at 84 to 98% or it completes and the system is unusable (e.g. no boot record, orphaned records and alike).
I wonder whether anybody has a clue what this could be and how to deal with it.