Can anyone help me understand whats going on here?

I have the Beta1 ,NET CD's and have been trying to load on my Win98 machine for about 2 weeks. I've loaded the components CD1 stuff as prompted, but the main load of .NET keeps hanging.

The CD and the HD are both spinning at full speed but nothing seems to be happening. Sometimes I get the blue screen fatal error and open/close the CD door, sometimes this progresses the load a bit more, sometimes not. I then get another setup starting......

I recon its transferred at most 20% (looking at the progress bar). How can I get this thing onto my machine?

I've plenty space, RAM and power - is it the OS?