try ram sticks, mem test. if that checks out, either bad ISO or cd. you replaced the drive, but try burning a new image and check the iso is good before hand.

I was going to say there was some weirdness with making bootable partitions past 2GB with some BIOS, but I guess with win2k and NTFS it was 8GB where things got weird. So that kinda shot my theory on "probably not this, but weird things I remember from back in the day."

In a totally different direction, I used to have awesome "luck" running the horribly unsupported (but awesome!) practice of just sticking with FAT32, and running both DOS/9x and NT/2K from the same partition sharing the Program Files dir. Just set the default win dir for win2k to... well WIN2K works.

Yea it's really really REALLY wrong but most apps of the era worked both in 9x and NT/2K. So dirty it hurts.... 🤣

EDIT ADD: to be more relevant. Try just "swapping" your ram sticks. like stick in slot 1 put into 2. slot 2 into 1. If your errors suddenly start at 30% there you go.

Is the error from attempting to read a file or to write one? Does the BIOS properly support an 80GB disk? Does the HDD have bad sectors?

Never heard about any problem with partition size under Win2k until you go beyond 128GB. At least not for service pack 3 and later.

It's true that it will run fine from FAT32, I've been doing it for 18 years. The default directory for 2k is WINNT so that's not even a concern.

Bakemono already mentioned some of the things I'd want to eliminate as part of the diagnostic process, but I'd also add trying the drive on its own cable & controller (if possible) and I also wonder about the drive temperature.
I've had 80GB IDEs and SATAs start to give me errors when they get overheated (over 50-55 C). At least you're not using Maxtor drives..
Is there any way you can get some active airflow over the drive during installation?

appiah4 wrote on 2021-01-07, 06:20:

So the issue is, during copying of files to an NTFS partition on the same drive (D:) I always start getting errors near 70% mark. Setup complains about a file on the hard drive not being correct, and no amount of retrying fixes that.

How was D: created? How did you create the extended partition? If you used MS-DOS I suspect this is the root cause of your issues.

I would put the drive into a Windows 2003 or earlier system and use that to create the extended partition and logical drivers. As a minimum create them when installing W2K.

One of my quad boot systems is as below. I tend to copy the CDs onto the KITS disk and install from there.

Have you verified the installation media isn’t damaged in some way? You could try to install Win2k in a virtual machine using that installation CD to ensure it is capable of a proper installation.

It was RAM. I removed both sticks and stuck in a PC66 64MB known good stick, and Windows 2000 installation completed without issues.

Now I will need to do some RAM testing with memtest86. Fun times.

One of the 128MB sticks was throwing crazy amounts of RAM errors, replacing that fixed everything!

See? This came from a discovery decades ago when I worked with a smart guy who ran his computer business, he said that was memory issue if any of the blue screen or odd problems with windows in general.

I had seen this happen occasionally including our family's computer that had third-party memory. Replacing the set fixed that.

Cheers,