On the GUI installation, the following error appears on starting the “Windows Install” stage:
“Setup failed to install the product catalogs. This is a fatal error. The setup log files should contain more information.”
(Español: “The installation program cannot install the product catalogs. This is a serious mistake. The installation log files should contain more information”)
On clicking Accept, the log appears, containing amongst others, an error about:
“Error: The signature for Windows XP Professional Setup is invalid. The error code is 80096001.”
(Español: “Error: Invalid Windows XP Professional Edition Setup Signature. The error code is 80096001.”)
If you close this dialog, the system will immediately restart.
While this can have other causes, in my case it was because I was using “ProfilesDir=D:Users” in my unattended setup to relocate all the user data to another partition, and forgot to format D: in the script.
As a quick fix, I opened a terminal with the handy (and obscure) Shift+F10 shortcut, did a “format /fs:ntfs /q D:”, and restarted. And so did the installation, which finished correctly.