This is the most common error. It means Windows 2000 loaded the USB drivers to start the setup but lost connection with the USB drive partway through, or it cannot read the hard drive controller.

A genuine image of your installation disc. USB Drive: At least 2GB is sufficient for Windows 2000.

Leo stared at the blinking cursor on the black screen. It was 2026, and he was trying to install Windows 2000. Not on a vintage ThinkPad for a retro battlestation, but on the industrial CNC router at his family’s metal shop. The machine ran on a Pentium III and a BIOS so old it remembered Y2K. The built-in CD-ROM drive had died six years ago, and the only storage the motherboard understood was a 20GB hard drive and—barely—a USB 1.1 port.

He learned the forbidden lore: This meant using a tool called mkisofs to create a bootable CD image, then writing that image to a USB drive using physdiskwrite in raw mode. But that only got him to the blue text-mode setup. Once that loaded, it would ask for the "CD-ROM driver" and freeze.

How to Install Windows 2000 from USB: A Complete Retro-Computing Guide