I tried all the stuff (well, a whole lot of it) and none of it worked for me.
I think I have a solution for many people here.
So then I found another site that recommended asking MS for a new disc or burning a disc image copy. It turns out you have to shell out $60 for MS support, so I tried burning an image and it gave up about 25% of the way into it and spit the DVD back out (this is a WinXP SP2 legit DVD btw).
Here's the good part.
While I was remarking about how late it was getting (after all these restarts) I looked at the disc and it looked like there were bubbles coming out of the disc! I thought, 'Whoa! I've fallen asleep and I'm having one of those crazy elephant dreams!'.
It turns out the anti-copy labels microsoft puts on their DVDs is very reflective and does not stick very well AT ALL to the surface of the disc. In the fog of the wee hours (and in a kind of primeval anger) I ripped the label right off the disc!
Just ripped it right off!
There was some reflective residue, but I was able to peel away I'd say 85% of the label. I tried to make an image copy (.iso) using the disk first aid and it copied the whole thing very quickly. Then I thought, 'Why not just use this disc instead of copying it?' So I did.
And I made it to the end of the installer!
Hope that helps someone. It looks like the people who pay for the legitmate copies of XP are caused to suffer by MS.
Update: Ah, I got the 'boot from CD, press any key' error, so I'll try NTSC instead of FAT32. Thanks for all the help, guys!
