I took an educated guess because it kept happening at the same spot when loading the XP install. I thought it was the hard drive or motherboard.
But it turns out my heavily used but loved NEC 3500 DVD-RW drive was the culprit. After disconnecting it and swapping it for another much beloved Pioneer DVD-RW, everything has gone smoothly.
I never ran into this or many issues because I've hardly used this drive since moving it to another Desktop years ago. I actua........
DVD Burners and Media at an all time lowThis is crazy you can buy a nice Pioneer DVD burner for like $64 CAD now and good media like 50PC Maxell is just $25.97 at Walmart.
I'm liking this. Time to make double archives of important data :)........