I have a Windows 2000 SP4 disk I used to load the OS back on my Dell.  I used makedisk32.exe from the 2000 cd, using Windows XP to make four setup floppies.  Then I couldn't get setup to start reading from the Windows 2000 CD after setup loaded.

I note that the Windows 2000 setup program looks very similar to the Windows XP setup program (both of them the DOS based ones, if thats the right term, I'm talking about the setup programs that you use if starting with a formatted hard drive, not running the CD as an "upgrade" from Window 98) except the XP setup boots entirely from the CD and the Windows 2000 setup uses four floppies.

After about three hours of trying to read the Windows 2000 cd from setup unsuccessfully, I read online from a page I found on google that based on my error message I was getting about the .sif file was missing or corrupted, I focused in on setup floppy #1. It had a .sif file that was 349kb, and the same .sif file was also on the Windows 2000 CD in the I386 folder, whatever the name is, there's only one .sif file on setup floppy #1.  The .sif file with the same name in I386 was only 328kb, leading me to guess that the larger file had extra stuff in it that was not supposed to be there.  So I replaced the .sif file on floppy one with the smaller .sif file with the same name from the CD, and the setup program proceeded to load the data from the CD and Windows 2000 installed successfully!

Does anyone know how one file on a floppy made from an image file could be corrupted yet the other files on the floppy#1 seemed okay?

And, is that the only way setup will load (floppies) if you're booting from a removable disk as opposed to doing an upgrade installation?  

***I don't understand why the same files are on the CD that are on the floppies but you have to use floppies to boot???

Yes, I agree about avoiding floppies.  I was reading up on slipstreaming and making a boot disk.  It does not appear to want to boot from the CD for some reason.

I built a custom ghost boot cd following rad's instructions, it was so helpful.  I know there's a way to take the files off the cd and make a boot cd if I needed to, I think it would involve some injecting and other things I did to make rad's ghost boot cd.

I suspect that the person who gave me the windows 2000 cd may have added SP4 by slipstreaming and that somehow that caused the txtsetup.sif file to become corrupt.  I have to get back to them on that to see if that's what they did...