^As above.^

When I put it into my CD drive it doesn't start up, and when I explore the files on the CD-ROM and double-click "Setup", nothing happens. I know I shouldn't have expected it to work on my operating system, but is there anything I could do to make it compatible with my OS?

Is there any way that I can rip the files from this CD-ROM add some files and make another copy on a blank CD-R?

Thankyou, and I'd appreciate any suggestions.

Windows 2K is NTFS and the other Operating systems are DOS Systems, but this shouldn't stop the .exe files from starting up. Either you stopped applications from running on your CD-Rom or the Discs are bad, or the CD-Rom has a hard time reading the .exe files.

If the CD-Rom is shut off from running the programs, you can try to enable it: open control panel, internet options - Advanced tab - scroll down to the bottom, somewhere - look for "Allow active content from CDs to run on My Computer" and check it off. Then try the disks again - if it doesn't work, try to restart. If that doesn't work, just try to burn the discs to another disc at a slow burn speed, to make sure you get the data needed for the installation.
As long as they're installation discs you should have no problem. Is there an "autorun.inf" and a "setup.ini" on the discs?? if not, then you don't have installation discs. If they're discs that were previous burns, then those burns were bad.

If they're legitimate Microsoft Operating System Discs, and you own them, then you can back them up.

If you want to install Widows 3.1, 95, or 98 after you installed Windows 2K Pro - you can't. You can't go backwards; if you went the other way around, then this could have been done. You can try to install them to another hard drive, but there's no guarantee that you'll boot back into Win 2K, or that you'll have a choice of which OS to boot to.

The dye used on CD's only have a life expectancy of 5 years. It doesn't mean discs only last for 5 years, but it does mean software companies don't replace discs that have gone bad after 5 years.

In XP, when you right click a file and select Properties, there is a Compatibility tab that allows you to run the program using a Compatibilty "shim". This functionality is actually in Windows 2000 once it is patched with SP2 or higher. To enable it, go to Start>Run and type:

regsvr32 %systemroot%\apppatch\slayerui.dll

Now hit Enter; a message should pop up saying that the DLL was successfully registered.

Now when you right click a shortcut and select Properties, you should see a Compatibility tab. You can try creating a shortcut to the executable on the CD, enabling Win9x emulation, and then double-clicking the shortcut. Sometimes you need to copy the entire CD to your hard drive, make a shortcut to the executable, enable compatibility mode on the shortcut, and try running from this shortcut.