Installation Failure

[DTowleJr]

I'm repairing a friends HP Pavilion a810e system with XP Home. He said that he accidentally hit F11 (Recovery) and his computer doesn't work now. I couldn't get any hardware to be recognized by the system, and since his recovery disks were burned on 2 DVDs, there was no way of getting the OS to read from the Recovery Disks. So I tried to install my XP Pro Upgrade onto the machine. I had to flip flop my 2 burned copies in order to get all the files installed, what would fail on one copy would work when I continued the process with the other copy. Then the system rebooted to continue the install.

Therein lies the problem that I am having. The system has finished the first 3 of 5 parts and is now trying to install Windows XP. It starts to read the CD, then gets a failure popup with the following lines:

Error:

Installation failed: J:\I386\asms. Error message: Error performing inpage operation.

Error:

SXS.DLL: Syntax error in manifest or policy file "J:\I386\asms\1000\MSFT\WINDOWS\GDIPLUS\GDIPLUS.MAN" on line 4.

And it continues several more times to relook at the CD before aborting. I have tried both CDs with the same result and am at a loss on how to continue.

How can I get past this and finish the installation?

[ornicar69]

Hi,

I'm not sure this will help you, but I had the same problem. My Windows XP CD was brand new and all was OK until this weird message "installation failure" requiring a ASMS file...

And now I know how to go through this problem : just change your DVD drive for a CD/CDR drive. And it works!

Don't ask me why, this is really strange. You can re-install your your DVD drive later, and it will still work.

I hope this will help you. Have a nice day!

[majormashup]

I have been in a similair situation before and I have found the easiest thing to do is to share an image of your xp disc over a network and use Bart's Network boot disc to boot into dos with windows file sharing and run setup.exe from a dos prompt. Sorry if this is a bit of a dirty solution but it does work. Have fun with it.

N.B. it's probably feasible you could use a bart PE disc for the same thing but having never tried it I can't advise.

Edited January 21, 2009 by majormashup