when i was building my computer, i got a cheap DVD drive, and i'm paying for it now with trouble installing any of the software that came on DVDs with my MSDN subscription. I tried installing Windows Server 2003 from the DVD by booting straight from the CD but it failed at different stages, saying file not found, or corrupted files etc. I'm convinced its because of the quality of the dvd drive. To be safe, I now copy all the files to the hard drive and then install from there. Even copying the files to the harddisk through Windows was not trivial as ms point out in http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;Q318945, they recommend using the xcopy command to verify that the files are copied correctly. The copy speed with xcopy was several times faster than using windows explorer, I have no idea why, but i always do it that way now. The syntax is:
xcopy <source> <destination> /V /H /Y /E
e.g. (from the command prompt. Start > Run > cmd.exe)
xcopy E:\VS2003\ C:\Local\VS2003 /V /H /Y /E
The switches mean:
/V = verify
/H = hidden files
/E = sub folder including empty folders
/Y = suppresses prompting to overwrite