Had the same problem.

Believe it had to do with recognition of CD drive and or copy mode.

In any event, what I did after 2 tries was to copy entire XP install disk
to a subdirectory on computer's hard drive (C:\XP), and then after
booting from the XP disk (or was it from a floppy?) went to DOS mode,
and did the install from the hard drive.

Worked fine 1st time out.