So Leo dove into the rabbit hole.
Except he didn't have a single ISO. He had the loose files. He spent an hour using mkisofs -b boot.bin to craft a perfect, 680MB hybrid ISO that fit on the drive. The command line arguments looked like a magic spell: -no-emul-boot -boot-load-seg 0x7c0 -boot-info-table . install windows 2000 from usb
title Install Windows 2000 map --mem /WIN2000/setup.iso (0xff) map --hook chainloader (0xff) So Leo dove into the rabbit hole
It worked. The text-mode setup launched. It copied files from the "CD" (the USB). But then came the first reboot. He spent an hour using mkisofs -b boot
Installing Windows 2000 from USB is a hack. The operating system was designed for CD-ROMs and Floppy disks.
When you select a Windows 2000 ISO in modern versions of Rufus, the application detects that Windows 2000 cannot natively boot from USB.