I recently came back from a Europe trip for five months,
and when I arrived home I took my computer system from out of the garage
from which it was stored and tried booting it back up.

For some reason my hard drive died. It wasnt detecting it on my bios and
whenever I tried to load from it, I was going a harddrive boot error message.
Anyways I went out and bought a new hard drive, replaced the old one and attempted
to reinstall XP Home edition. I have an XP Home Edition Service pack 2 disc burned
that I bought from a computer technician a while ago for my Cicero when it was giving
me problems. The installation went fine until I got to the part where it was trying to
actually install XP.

It gave me a message that said

"The file "asms" on WinXP Home Edition Service Pack 2 CD is needed"

and below it was the directory leading to

GLOBALROOT\DEVICE\CDROMO\1386


Now, I dont know where the hell the asms file is or what directory I should have to
type in. And I also dont ever remember coming across this problem before when I tried
to reinstall windows using this CD. Right now I had to reassemble my old computer and use
it until I can figure out how this works, which is what I have done and how I am able to post this thread. But I hate this computer...

Help?

Have alook on the install CD. If there is a directory \i386, there will be a sub-directory ASMS.

However, your CD may be of the type that unpacks onto your hard drive and the i386 directory is somewhere there in an install location. If the installer gives you the option of specifying its location (probably via a Browse search), you may get it all sorted.

I checked the CD and its there, so what could it be? A faulty CD ROM drive? Or should I just get the techs to make me a new one?

I forget whether or not Windows Install gices you the option to define the path. This term:
GLOBALROOT\DEVICE\CDROMO\i386
strikes me as a substitutable path name.

If you can specify the file location then it';; be something like D:\i386 or d:\i386\asms

even though i don't think it will help,as it wants to do a regedit ,and you don't have windows loaded yet, i will post the link anyway ,seems like it could be a bad cd-rom drive or bad burned copy of windows .
http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=311755

PS.Maybe you got some oil sands in the cdrom drive .LOL
I worked in FT. Mac in the 70's

Well for what it's worth,I have a brand new something or otherddl device that installed,vista already (yeah,going back to pro forawhile) tried a slipstreamed disc (many uses)two new xp-prodiscs,and one "evaluation disc".
No joy here either,"I'll be back".
Rik

Well now;
MS was not helpful,post #3 was right,I changed the cd-rom/dvd,player.
Installing fine.
To be fair most people dont have access to "extra" stuff lying around. I have run into Blue screens of death on thesame kind of repair dude was doing.
Two new units in a year wont install XP?
Another conspiracy theory is born---.
rik

Hey Guys,
You might be surprised with another unique answer to this solution that I have discovered. I don't know if you guys remember this but MSCDEX.EXE used to be used for DOS to recognize CD-ROM drives. What I did was load this file once I got the 'asms file' error. How did I do this?
I hit SHIFT + F10.. This loaded the command prompt. At this point you should be able to type the command.. Try either MSCDEXNT.EXE or MSCDEX.EXE

Once this file loads you will notice your CD Drive will start to awaken and read data. Windows will then recognize the data in the drives.

If you cannot load the MSCDEXNT command from the command prompt then run regedit from the command prompt. Through regedit do a File... Import... This will bring up an open Dialogue Box... Through this dialog box you can fish through your windows/system32 directory and right-click/open the mscdexnt.exe FILE...

Good Luck people.. I know it's a very odd solution but it worked for me..