big problems with Windows XP Home Edition installation

I'm having a heck of a time installing windows xp home edition on my PC. It's a pentium 3 with 256 meg of RAM. I reformatted the HD and used the set up disks. I get to about the 88% complete level and it tells me that there are a whole group of files that can't be copied. I hit ESC and it moves on. What could be the reason for it not wanted to copy these files? Before anyone asks...yes, I am working from a full version of XP that I purchased myself. Thanks everyone!
-Dave

 

?Personal experience: Cdrom to harddrive read/writes. I could install again and again and the files would be different each time. I had to copy files to the harddrive and install from there. This took care of the problem.

Alternative was to allow, depending upon the files, the install making note of the names of the files. Extracted and replaced/placed them afterwards.

In other words this could be caused by a few problems. Dirty CD, cdrom speed/drivers, ram, bad CD, etc.... and as said earlier, for myself, install files copied to harddrive always took care of this.