I'm sure this had come up many times but I've searched and got no hits...

I'm installing Win2003 Server Standard R2, which has SP1 integrated onto the disc, I was able to get through most of setup, but now I get a message that prompts me to insert "Service Pack 1 CD-ROM".

The path in the dialog box points to D:\i386 so I took the CD out and reinserted it. It doen't accept it.

I inserted the R2 (labeled disc 2 of 2) into the drive, but that didn't work, as I expected.

Clicking Browse and trying to select drive d: gives me an error that the drive is unavailable. It has an X through it in the list of drives. The drive is of course availalble, its been reading from the CD for the earlier portions of setup!

Should I just download SP1 and burn it to a CD?

Clicking Browse and trying to select drive d: gives me an error that the drive is unavailable. It has an X through it in the list of drives. The drive is of course availalble, its been reading from the CD for the earlier portions of setup!

This sounds like a hardware issue to me... Have you tried using another drive and/or CD?

Is letter D assigned to your cd-rom?

At a quick guess i'd be thinking that either the Sp-tag file was missing

from the root of the cd, or something related to Sp1 in the I386 folder

Where would I get this SP1 tag file?

I did try hitting cancel. And it worked! Windows does appear to be corrupt, Help and IE, and some other apps are missing. I also get an error at startup about a service unable to start. Whatever is causing this, those files seem to be very important.

I thought it was a bad CD with a corrupt file, probably SP1.cab so I installed from the ISO in Virtual PC. It worked.

So I burned a new CD and tried again. It got through most of the installation but it stopped at the minus 17 minutes point and prmpted me for the disc again. Goign to drive D: gives me an error. Same problem.

Did you modify this CD in any way - like add drivers or install scripts to the CD (more worried about drivers at this point, if it works in a VM)?

No, I made no changes. I just dumped the contents of my (non-bootable MSDNAA) CD to my hard drive and used nlite to make a bootable ISO.

If you provide it a CD with SP1 extracted to it (run the sp1 executable with the /x parameter, and burn the resulting folder structure to a CD), does it work, or is it an actual problem reading from the CD drive itself?

The problem appeared to be reading from the CD itself, only at that stage of setup, minus 27 minutes.

I did get it to work: I created a new ISO and burned it to DVD with the BTS driverpacks integrated and a WINNT.SIF, with i368 copied to the root of drive c: via $OEM$ folders. For every prompt for the CD when I reached this error I had to manually answer to look in c:\i386 rather than d:\i386, about 6 times.

I still have no idea why this happened only on this (real) machine. If it was a driver problem, the driverpacks should have resolved it (nvdia nforce 4 chipset). The drive continues to work fine. When I went back and installed some non-default Windows components I was prompted to insert the CD-ROM, I inserted the DVD and it worked fine.