SSD crashing during driver installation

Hey everyone, I’ve run into a bit of a headache here and I’m starting to lose my patience.
I picked up a 120GB SSD and popped it into my Asus K73SV. Everything goes perfectly during the initial Windows 7 installation, but as soon as I insert the disc that came with the laptop to install the drivers and all that necessary software, everything falls apart. After I finish installing the first three applications—regardless of the order—the laptop just crashes and restarts, telling me I need to insert a bootable DVD or CD. When I put the Windows disc back in, the SSD doesn't even show up as a selectable drive. I even tried downloading the drivers directly from the web, but it's the exact same story. Basically, everything works flawlessly until those drivers are installed. It was working perfectly fine on the secondary HDD. I even attempted to use Acronis to fix it, but 👎

Which driver did you install? What's the BSOD saying?

Most of the time, it's this "Intel Management Engine Interface" that causes the system to crash. Interestingly, I don't run into these issues with the Wi-Fi, VLAN, or BIOS drivers. However, I am definitely seeing problems popping up with the fastboot driver.

Today, I’m even getting screwed over by the Intel Graphics driver

Maybe grab Hiren's Boot CD and run a quick scan on the RAM and the hard drive for any bad sectors

Did you actually set the BIOS to AHCI mode?