Complaints in newsgroups, etc., about this "missing asms file" issue go back
about five years. I personally have encountered the error at least three
times in as many years. Microsoft's Knowledge Base article Q311755 -- the
one that MVPs usually refer XP users to when they respond to this complaint
-- is irrelevant and useless. The KB article referenced by "Plato" (315341)
in this thread does not appear to be very helpful either -- at least it does
not directly refer to the error message you received. I believe that there
is now, or has been, a bug in the Windows XP setup CD. Thus far, there is no
helpful KB article about this bug and no workaround.
For any MVP or user who may be reading this, I can summarize briefly 1) what
leads up to this Windows XP setup disk error; 2) how to reproduce the
"missing asms file" bug on the XP setup CD; 3) why the KB article Q31175 is
unhelpful.
1. A user elects this "repair" option in the XP Setup only after all other
efforts to recover have failed. I got to this do-or-die place a while back
by exporting and then deleting 10 registry keys that all pertained (I
thought) to an application that didn't properly uninstall itself.
I had tried "Last Known Good Configuration", Safe Boot and its variants, and
so I knew I could not boot to Safe mode; I had tried "Don't reboot after
startup failure" (or whatever the wording is, toward the bottom of the list.
Without Safe Mode, you cannot import saved "reg" files, run the Reg.exe tool,
restore a System State backup made with NT Backup, or use System Restore. I
had tried the Recovery Console, and (under the guidance of a Microsoft Tech
Support specialist) copied the original five registry files from Repair
subfolder of Sys32. That didn't work either.
2. According to the authoritative book, "Windows XP: Inside Out"
(Microsoft, 2001, p.815ff), "you may be able to repair your Windows XP
installation using the Windows Setup program. . . . The repair option is
quick and painless..." The same advice appears in other XP books. This is
*not* the repair option that appears right after "Welcome to Setup" screen.
At that screen, press Enter, not R. Soon after, press F8 to accept the EULA,
and from the screen showing your Windows installations (usually one), choose
the correct installation, and *then* press R. The setup program reloads XP
OS files, then reboots your PC. Soon after this reboot, you'll get a message
saying the system cannot find a file called "ASMS", and it gives you an input
box to enter the correct path of that file.
However, though an ASMS *folder* exists, there is no ASMS file on my Windows
XP setup disk, probably not on yours either, no way to work around the error,
and no way to continue past this point.
At this point, a user writes to a newsgroup or searches Microsoft or Google
for a KB article that could help. Or, like me, he or she calls Microsoft
Tech Support (incident 1038826788 in my case) about the problem -- they guide
you through all the above steps, and then summarily *give up without an
explanation* when you get to the ASMS error, advise you to reinstall XP, and
refund your $80.
3. The only Microsoft Knowledge Base article that pertains to this issue,
Q311755, under the section on the NTFS file system, offers three "methods" to
fix the problem. The first, running RegEdit, can only work if you can get to
the command prompt -- but if you could run Windows in Safe Mode, you would
not be using this last resort from the setup disk in the first place. The
second method advises installing Windows in another partition; no thanks,
that is no easier than reinstalling the whole OS on the main partition. The
third method says to "use the original XP CDROM" (the one with the hologram),
not a copy. If the original can't be found, "look for the Asms folder. If
the folder is missing or the files that it contains are zero bytes, the
CD-ROM was not burned correctly. "
But as stated above, while an ASMS folder exists, there is no ASMS file,
even on the hologram copy of the XP Pro setup CD. That's why this third
solution fails.
I should mention that some XP users apparenntly have used the repair
function without receiving the "missing ASMS file" error. Please search on
"asms" and "repair" at this site to see complaints similar to yours, and to
follow the threads.
Even so, I know there has been defect in the XP setup CD at some time in the
past. It is evident Microsoft knows about the issue (since KB article
Q311755 acknowledges it), and I believe it is time Microsoft publicly
acknowledged this defect in their setup CD and offer some kind of workaround
for those who have been affected.
