i've got winxp home edition on amd 1.8G with 256 ram
3dfx voodoo 3, sb live value
having upgraded to xp, all my games are screwing up during installation.
At about 33% i get "catastrophic failure" and my cdrom drive spins wildly for a while before the application shuts down.
The same thing happens for mohaa and disciples 2!
any help will be greatly appreciated!

Sounds like a problem with you CD-Rom - try cleaning the lens on it.

Use a standard lens cleaner, availble from anywhere. Even one designed for PSX or something will work.

Dont use it on a CD-R though, then lenses in those are different and can be destroyed more easily.

Another problem might be that you upgraded to winXP - apparently there are some problems doing this and a clean XP install works better.

it's a cdrom problem. i had that on my old cd rom.

i don't think it's a cdrom problem in my case.
i've copied all 4 cds to my drive and installed from there.
and the same thing just happens!

You could try re-installing an earlier operating system like 98SE, another thing I would chech is your RAM I built a system that did somthing much the same as you are describing, it was a faulty RAM module. Worth looking at anyway.

pinworm,
It's a Win XP problem.
I recently moved up from a PII Win-98 to a Sony Vaio P IV workstation with Windows HomeXP. I have the same problem with BGII's install, and BGI won't install at all! BGII will only perform a 'Recommended' size install. It crashes if I try to perform a full install, and I have the same symptoms that you have experienced. At least it still runs on the partial install. BGI fails on loading several files, but allows me to continue the install. Then, it fails to initailize whenever I try to start the game.
Shortly after this change change of systems I picked up a back copy of PC orld with a lead article about the software incompatabilities in XP,...wouldn't you know.
I've been watching MicroSoft for news about fixes to these problems, but haven't seen anything so far. I guess that the 'bug factory' is still busy fixing the security issues. I have three of those fixes now and still have trouble with my firewall too!