Irony is, the thing that didn’t work was some­thing that’d been paid for. Again. That’s twice this has hap­pened now.

Pop the disc in, over a per­fectly legit­i­mate install of Win­dows, to wipe and upgrade (from within the installer, so it can detect Win­dows first). Nat­u­rally, it doesn’t work. So I pull out a legit­i­mate Win­dows disc to flash at it. Of course, it doesn’t work. On one of the installs, it wasn’t even an OEM mod­i­fied disc (I’ve got a Win­dows ME disc here from Gate­way which it also choked on, later) — but alas, it would not work.

Ahar­rrr! Thar be pirates lurkin’!

A quick sail over to them thar dan­ger­ous peer-to-peer waters quickly patched up the prob­lem, espe­cially when I can down­load an OEM disc image (~400MB) faster than Win­dows XP actu­ally installs. Not that any­one ever would, of course. Yarrrrrr!

It’s now installing rather hap­pily, just for the record. And there are sep­a­rate licenses for each of the com­put­ers Win­dows XP is being installed on (or has been installed on), and the pirated copy of Win­dows 98 isn’t in use… but it sure sim­pli­fied the instal­la­tion process! Thank you, Gnutella!