"The file 'asms' on Windows XP Professional Service Pack 2 CD is needed"

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Level 4

1,722 points

"The file 'asms' on Windows XP Professional Service Pack 2 CD is needed"

Hello folks,

I'm having no luck trying to install Windows XP Pro incl. SP3 on my MacBook Air SSD via the bootcamp assistant (3.0.2). I get to the "39-minute" mark, when Windows is starting up from a reboot and trying to finish the installation and have the following message flagged:

"The file 'asms' on Windows XP Professional Service Pack 3 CD is needed"

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT3259 specifically deals with this problem, but the fix is not fixing anything.

Has anyone else out there encountered this and found a more suitable fix?

FWIW, I've also tried using SP2 and burning an image of the XP Pro disk to a blank CD and using this for the installation, in case I have a damaged original disk - yes, it is a legal OEM disk - but all to no avail thus far...

Many thanks for all offers of help or even advice, e.g. give up now...

MacBook Air SSD, Mac OS X (10.6.3), 2.13 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, 2GB 1067 MHz DDR3

Posted on Jun 16, 2010 10:48 AM

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Answer 1

jia10 Author

Level 4

1,722 points

Jun 17, 2010 12:04 PM in response to jia10

Well it seems that no-one is willing to tackle this question? My own solution has been to give up on boot camp assistant and use VMware Fusion (3) to set up a virtual Windows XP SP3 machine. The installation went through smoothly - well much more smoothly than with boot camp - and I now have Windows XP installed on my MacBook Air. Should any other MacBook Air (SSD) owners find a similar difficulty, I can only suggest using VMware, which you can buy from the Apple store for about £40, and you can try free of charge from the VMware website at https://www.vmware.com/tryvmware/?p=default for 30 days. Having been through all this, I am less than impressed with Apple Boot Camp...

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Answer 2

Jul 12, 2010 6:53 PM in response to jia10

I ran full tilt into this one with a MacBook Air (just bought in mid-2010), installing Windows XP SP3.

I was a bit dismissive of all the answers I found on the web suggesting a bad install disk, since this is corporate media burned from ISO that I use all the time.

However, in a thread elsewhere in the Internets someone proposed the idea that the CD driver used in the XP boot environment might not be doing a great job with the the Apple DVD drive (in this case the external one branded specifically to go with the MacBook Air).

So, if the problem was bad file reads during the Windows install "copying files" phase prior to the first reboot to the HD, the problem is to get the missing files onto the HD from the boot environment. The confusing thing was that file dialog offered limited options. It defaulted to an abstracted file path to a CD drive, something like "Systemroot\CDdrive0\i386", with the single choice from the drop-down being "A:\". Thought about getting my USB floppy drive, tried putting in a USB key (no lights).

Finally, I shrugged my shoulders and changed the path in the combo box to "D:\i386". Apple external DVD drive spun up, files copied. I had to repeat this process 2 dozen times for all the other files that apparently didn't get copied correctly, but cut and paste was active and in a few minutes I got through it.

I assumed the drive wasn't recognized since it didn't show up in the dropdown list, but I was wrong.

I hope this helps anyone else who gets backed into this corner, since in 2 dozen threads I didn't see the problem getting solved very often.

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