Win2K setup looping

[RICHINMINN]

This is occurring on a friend's machine that I am setting up for him, which consists of an MSI K7N2G motherboard with an AMD 2500+ Barton core CPU, 512 MB of DDR333 memory, a CD-R/RW, a DVD-ROM, a generic SATA RAID controller, and 2 Seagate Barracuda IV 160-GB drives. His original hard drive was dying, so he wanted me to upgrade him to SATA RAID 1, so I installed all of his original components with the new RAID controller and the two new SATA drives into a new Antec Sonata case. I had gone through a full installation of Win2K on this system just 2 days ago, and was having a bit of difficulty having the system recognize 2 new USB ports, so I thought that I would just start over, having the 2 new ports wired before I load Windows.

I deleted all partitions, repartitioned the drive (1 100-GB partition plus 3 20-GB partitions), and let the installation run. After the installation had copied all the files that it needed, it told me to remove the CD from the drive, and let it reboot. Which I did. Setup then went into its "component detection" phase, which took an awfully long time. Then it said that it needed more files from the CD labelled "Service Pack 3" (this is Win2K with SP3), so I put the CD back in the same drive, expecting Setup to copy whatever it needed and then continue. What it did, however, was restart Setup from the CD, going into file copy phase again, then told me to take the CD out again, and the system rebooted, and went into the detection phase. It once again asked for files from the "Service Pack 3" CD, which I reinserted, and it restarted Setup, ad infinitum.

There are no options for cancelling the process when Setup starts (or restarts), so you have to sit through all the file copying and component detection phases. I tried putting the CD in the other drive (DVD), and pointing Setup to that, but that has to be done on a file-by-file basis, and my patience ran out with that.

I tried this with two different Win2K CDs, the SP3 version and an older pre-SP version. Both did the same thing.

I wanted to format one of the small partitions and copy the contents of the Installation CD to it, then boot the system and start the installation from there, but I'm having problems getting partitions created and formatted outside of the installation process. (I want to format all 4 partitions in NTFS.)

Does anyone know:
1) Why this installation is stuck in this Setup loop?
2) What I can do to work around it?

The puzzling part to me is that I did a full installation, successfully, using the SP3 version of Win2K just two days ago, and the only difference between then and now is the original installation was unpartitioned, and did not have the additional USB ports wired to the motherboard.

Scratchin' my head...

Rich (in Minn.)

 

[bcastner]

The puzzling part to me is that I did a full installation, successfully, using the SP3 version of Win2K just two days ago, and the only difference between then and now is the original installation was unpartitioned, and did not have the additional USB ports wired to the motherboard."

Reverse what I have boldfaced above.

 

[stuuked]

did you pick the raid drive option in the begining of the setup screen?

 

[RICHINMINN]

I managed to get the OS to load. When Setup asked to have the CD put back in the drive, I put it in the DVD-ROM drive, and pointed Setup to go to the H: drive rather than the G: drive. I had to do this for every additional file that it said it needed (I lost track of how many times I had to do this), and the installation proceeded normally, without restarting Setup. I left the USB connections in place.

Rich (in Minn.)