The Problem
I decided to give Microsoft one more chance to have one of its (non)operating systems on my primary home computer. After reformatting my drive and beginning installing Windows XP from a freshly opened WinXP CD that I received direct from Dell, the following message appeared: “Manifest Parse error: Invalid at top level of document”. The installation failed and stopped because it could not correctly parse the CONTROLS.MAN file.
There are many theories as to what causes the error. Many folks prefer to keep their original disks in close-to-pristine condition and install from CD copies, yet rumors abound that as many as 60-70% of copies experience this error during installation. On the other hand, hundreds of people have gotten the error while installing from fresh-out-of-the-shrink-wrap, boxed versions of Windows XP. I’ve heard everything from “it’s a copy protection scheme” to “it locks you out after three installations”. None of the theories seem to be accurate.
I must be a glutton for punishment, because rather than scrapping the OS completely, I decided to push all the theories aside and figure out how to get around the problem. Old habits — like most computers running Microsoft operating systems — die hard.
The Solution
The /i386/asms/6000/msft/windows/common/controls/controls.man file on the CD is corrupt. Microsoft’s installation program doesn’t allow you to select an alternate source location for the file. It doesn’t even allow you full command prompt access. And the Recovery Program is useless, as it doesn’t even allow you to copy directories or copy using wildcards!
Copy your entire CD to your harddrive, use my version of the CONTROLS.MAN file (don’t forget to change the file extension), and burn another CD. In theory, you could copy the entire i386 directory to your harddrive, replace the damaged file, and then run \i386\winnt.exe to install, but if you really want a reliable and stable system, it is not wise to install the XP operating system over an existing, older OS. Burning a CD is the best viable option for a fresh, clean install.
Whether the new OS works well enough to dissuade me from breaking down and purchasing an iMac remains to be seen.
OK ok… I just got a burnt copy of Xp… That’s right burnt. And I got the same message as everyone else something about not be able to copy some folder. I’m trying to change the controls.man, hopefully it works. I’m really lost when it comes to burning images with Ahead Nero, can anyone help?
Someone mentioned that Disc-At-Once and being sure to Finalise the CDburn fixes the problem – They are spot on… Unfortunately i had to drive back into work to try this, but it was well worth the drive in…
Thanks guys!!
I’m pretty certain those two steps ARE required Brad.
I uploaded a copy of the CONTROLS.MAN file to my “Manifest Parse Error” site for those having trouble creating their own.
http://www.geocities.com/zrantheus/
Good luck.
ZD
Richard,
thanks for the wealth of information you’ve collated and thanks to the community of contributors. List me as another victim of the abovementioned ‘manifest’ error. I had other options for restoring WinXP Pro on my PC (ie vendor disks to recover back to factory settings which included WinXP) but I tried a friend’s WinXP Setup CD to compare hardware support for an existing CD burner …an internal HP CDWriter Plus 8200 which has a top burn speed of 4X and came supplied with Adaptec Easy CD Creator 3.5c. It’s a trooper that’s served well for 18 months and highlighted the “manifest” error. I empathise with Tom Miller … I too have initiated at least 10 iterations of “format-hard-drive, install WinXP” but scrapping the burner was at the bottom of the ‘culprit’ list ie. there are 6,500 files that are burned on the WinXP Setup CD ….
a) why are there less than a handful of files bearing grief ??!!
b) you can burn a dåmn lot of CDs using any number of CD burning freeware or shareware for the price of a new CD burner
c) there’s no guarantee the new CD burner will fix the problem
My problems appear attributable to the CD burning software. During the recent repeated rebuilds of my PC, I engaged the services of a colleague (well, actually…the colleague was useless but their Win XP CD was instrumental). Starting with a clean hard drive, my colleague’s CD installed WinXP Pro from ‘go to whoa’ without any grief yet my copy of that CD bogged down with he ‘manifest’ error. Went to Bill Gates’ support web links and their suggestion is ‘return to vendor or buy a new CD’…. the cursade was on …. Bill Gates’ “manifest” error was stinking up the corridors of my mind. I had used Adapter Easy CD Creator option “CD Copier” in the hope it would make a mirror copy that would be equally WinXP Setup bootable on a clean hard drive. Well, it appears that ‘CD Copier’ is a loose term….they probably should have called it “CD Approximator”. I’ve had ‘buffer underrun’ errors during CD burnin but never discrimate file erosion. I’ve made 3 copies using burn speed of 1X, 2X and 4X all resulting in the different versions of corrupted file CONTROLS.MAN … all occurrences of the file showed 2K on disk, 2 of the 3 were empty (well …. might have had non-display characters but I couldn’t be bothered …. we’d be quibbling on different degrees of error),the third occurrence contained text reflecting the make/model of the CD Burner… go figure. I then copied WinXP setup folders/files from my colleague’s CD to my harddrive and then used Adapter CD Creator to create a CD layout and burn the files and there were no curruptions in the files, albeit the disks were not suitable for WinXp setup bootable on clean hard drive. I then repeated the burn of all the files with the exception of CONTROL.MAN leaving the disc open, then added the file on a second burn and it was still in perfect condition. (as you can clearly see, the medical association warns that Bill Gates is a health hazard !!!) At this point, i now have 8-9 CDs pinned on the cork board ….. 10 more and I’ll have enough for a mock-up 18-wheeler MACK truck with bogie.
Today I downloaded 30-day trial CD burning software ‘Alcohol120 v1.4.0 Build 114’ (self extracting 4Mb EXE available from http://www.alcohol-software.com),
installed it in 30 seconds, fired it up, hit the ‘Copy Wizard’, chose maximum speed for the CR-RW (yep ….used all the available 4X it could muster)
and out popped a sweet copy. The trooper HP CDWriter Plus 8200 is still going strong and it’s Adaptec that’s on the ‘Re-consider’ list. Another colleague has made a copy of the CD using a CD-RW purchased last weekend and that CD appears useable. The fact that most people are getting clean copies using current CD burning software suggests it’s not the hardware that’s at fault. Another observation i’ve just noticed is that the *.MAN files in question have perhaps the longest path names on the CD… coincidence ???!!! …AM 21/01/2003 ESDT Australia
Worked for me! Jus’ copied the whole contents of the XP CD to HD and copy and pasted Richies text above into Notepad, replaing the whatever file it was. Got no errors and installing my second copy as we (I) speak.
I read with great interest the experience of the many downtrodden users regarding the Manifest Parse Error. I’m not sure if my problem is related. My wife purchased a DELL Inspiron 2650 laptop from DELL online in Sep 2002. My system came with XP PRO and SP1, IE 6.0, Office 2002, and other bundled software pre-installed. On many occasions my system just hanged, sometimes with as little as two or three appplications loaded. Outside of the Office 2002 suite I use Quickbooks. A local PC technician told my wife that it was normal since XP has a number of quirks still to be ironed out. I recently installed the System Mechanic utility to scan my registry since I became fed up with the persistent system hangs. The results revealed several invalid (orphaned) entries in the following registry locations:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESOFTWAREMicrosoftWBEMWDM
“sample value name is C:WINDOWSsystem32advapi32.dll[MofResourceName]”.
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESOFTWAREMicrosoftWBEMWDMDREDGE
“sample value name is C:WINDOWSSystem32DRIVERSACPI.sys[ACPIMOFResource]”
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESOFTWAREMicrosoftWindowsCurrentVersionExplorerVolumeCachesActive Setup Temp Folders
“value name is Folder”
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESOFTWAREMicrosoftWindowsCurrentVersionSideBySideInstallations x86_Microsoft.Windows.Common-Controls_6595b64144ccf1df_6.0.10.0_x-ww_f7fb5805
“sample value name is Codebase” and “value data is C:WINDOWSServicePackFilesi386/controls.man”
N.B. all the *.man files are listed as invalid (orphaned)
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESOFTWARESynapticsSynTPInstall
“sample value name is MouseInf”
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESOFTWAREMicrosoftWindowsCurrentVersionSharedDLLs
“sample value names are C:WINDOWSSystem32MSXML3A.DLL” and “C:DOCUME~1HEATHE~1LOCALS~1Temp_ISTMP1.DIR_ISTMP0.DIRmediabuild20.dll”
I contacted DELL on 13-FEB-2003 and they sent me an XP hardware diagnostic utility – CD110210.exe – via email to run. It showed me that all my hardware devices except the Roxio Easy CD-ROM drive were okay. The CD-ROM drive failed the confidence test – READ, SEEK, WRITE, and AUDIO and was deemed incompatible. DELL Support indicated that if my hardware devices were deemed okay then I will need to reinstall my operating system, which I dread. DELL only supplied me with a reinstallation CD rather than an original operating system CD. They said that is all I will need for the job.
Since running the diagnostic test the system does not hang as often. I have to get back to DELL Support with the results. However, I am concerned about the number (55) and type of invalid registry entries that System Mechanic listed.
Would you please shed some light here? Thanks a $1,000,000 in advance. I regret being so lengthy, but I wanted to provide you with essential info to get a meaningful and effective response.
Cheers
MartinP
Another solution:
I had the same problem with setup giving me multiple .man file errors. My solution was to use Fireburner 2.1.7 to burn the ISO that I downloaded from MSDN.
It seems that the install process or the image itself is VERY sensitive to which program you use to burn the CD.
Rick
The problem is you are attempting to install an unauthorized copy of Windows XP. It is NOT a security feature. The easiest solution is to get another copy preferably from another more reliable source. The parse error originated when the original person was attempting to copy the windows xp on to another disc tried to copy from the windows xp cd-rom over to his hard drive and then to his cd burner. That’s the part when the security measure kicks in. What needs to be done is to use Roxio and do a disc to disc burn.
This site is a lifesaver! Can’t thank you enough for all the help it provided. I copied the I386 folder to my HD and modified the CONTROL.MAN file but rather than copying it back to a CD-R just told it to look there rather than the CD when it prompted. Worked like a charm! I built a new comp and was rather annoyed with having to use Win98 (FIRST ADDITION!). It was a major step up. However, will my OS be stable? I only did the upgrade and was wondering if it would be better or improve my proformance to do a full fresh copy of XP?
same problem tried your fix didn’t work just need a working copy of controls.man can you provide?
please and thanks.
Norman
Response to the slightly different comments about “Error: SXS.DLL: Syntax error in manifest or policy file “e:I386asms6000MSFTWINDOWSCOMMONCONTROLSCONTROLS.MAN” on LINE 4.” or “A Component’s file does not match the verification info present in the component manifest”
I was initially having the problem with controls.man at line 0. After replacing the file with a non-corrupt version I started getting the error at line 4. Strangely on my XP CD I had 2 folders containing Controls.man, one in the usual e:I386asms6000 folder, and one in a folder e:I386asms60100. It was the one in 60100 that seemed to be causing the problem. Most of the comments on this site seemed to be talking only about the folder 6000. I thought it would be worth just deleting this 60100 folder to get a CD with the same file structure as most of the people commenting on this page. And it seemd to work!
So if you have the problem at line 4, it may be worth trying this. Look for a folder called 60100 in I386asms on your CD. Copy everything but this folder onto a new CD. Install from you new CD. You may get an error during install saying something is missing, but XP seemed to install anyway.
It seems strange that it installed OK without this folder on the CD, but so far I seem to have a working copy of XP.
This is in response to Chris on February 24, 2003 12:52 PM
Chris, you are a God. THANK YOU SO MUCH! I have fought and fought with this stupid install and kept having problems with the 60100 folder (not the 6000). I finally found your posting and just DELETED the whole dåmn folder and…will wonders never cease….XP works! Gee Microsoft, that’s so intuitive.
[‘m] getting this error trying to install XP on [a] Toshiba Laptop with DVD. So pìssëd because I’ve used this disk several times. [The] .man files [are] there and intact – made a copy of CD with EZCD Copier ===NO GOOD=== made a copy with Clone CD Max read and 8x write and everything worked great. Apparently the DVD has problems with the CD as mentioned above. WEIRD! Maybe they should add thet [sic] to the XP compatiblity list! *LOL*
I had the same problem with a dell optiplex G1 that i am upgrading. then i used another copy cd and it worked. i still dont get it.
I have gotten the parse error also but I got it in a differnt file. My error is below.
Fatal Error
An error has been encountered that prevents setup from continuing.
One of the componenets that windows needs to continue setup could not be installed.
A component’s file does not match the verification information present in the component manifest.
***
Error:
SXS.DLL: Syntax error in manifest or policy file “E:I386asms6000MSFTVCRTLVCRTL.MAN” Line 11.
***
Error:
Installation Failed E:I386asms. Error Message: A component’s file does not match the verification information present in the component manifest.
***
Fatal Error:
One of the componenets that windows needs to continue setup could not be installed.
A component’s file does not match the verification information present in the component manifest.
What can i do about this? When i get this error XP setup restarts my computer and attempts to start setup again but it gets the same error, how do i fix this? It keeps going into an infinate loop. I have tried several times but keep getting the same error.
How do i fix this, please help me out.
Copied the data and created a new controls.man file and reburnt the cd with all the contents including the new man file but the man file will not run in dos. Any suggestions?
I actually went out and bought WinXP Home Edition today, only to get the same EXACT error ksuchoc is getting. Is there a solution to this?
Having not pirated XP, I took the original CD back to Best Buy today and received a new copy. XP installed off the new CD without a hitch…it seems that the original CD was faulty, right off the shelf. Now I see why people truly hate M$.
Being a computer builder and having installed XP Pro on many machines (new and used) from the same disk, it was, to say the least, extreemely frustrating to get the ‘manifest’ error. I used the 6 floppy disk boot for XP Pro and finished up with the CD. Worked well installation went without a hitch.
The version of CONTROLS.MAN in the .ISO file seems to be intact so the problem occurs when the ISO is burnt. A previous post mentions that these *.MAN files have longer paths than others on the CD. Anyone have any other ideas as to what could be the cause?
From the comments above it seems there is no common factor – different burning software, different hardware setups, pirated and legal versions all seem to be prone to the problem.
Could it really be some sort of copy protection by M$? I don’t see how it can be but then i’m not an expert in .isos and CD burning…. this is bugging me.. I want to know what is happening!
Ok it is my turn. I received the GDIPLUS.MAN error on line 4. This is after I (1) copied my XP to my harddrive; (2) revised all my .MAN files; (3) burned a CD at 2x with Easy Creator Version 4; and (4) banged my head against a wall until I was unconscious. What do I do???
joenrene – check that the files burnt onto your CD OK – do all the *.MAN files contain what seems like meaningful data when read from the CD? My guess is yet again for some reason they are screwing up during the burn process. I suggest burning again and verifying the *.MAN files are all OK on the CD before attempting the install.
It may take a few burns to get them all OK. Try varying burn speeds and maybe different software if you have no luck.
Dom -All the *.MAN files contain what seems like meaningful data when read from the CD. I then attempted the install with the same error gdiplus.man line 4. I do not have any other burn software to verify if my 2x burn is bad.
The main problem with these files, from what I can see, is that they violate the way cd’s are made. The directory length, along with the file name can be no logner than 64 characters on a cd-rom encoded with joilet, as is the XP cd’s. Unfortunately, MS has decided to push that number when burying these files. Some burning software might not recognize this file name scheme, and just leave files empty.
I counted 46 characters in the file name
I386ASMS6000MSFTWINDOWSCOMMONCONTROLSCONTROLS.MAN
Some drives may not support joilet correctly, especially when in the ghetto setup program. Your drive might default back to 32 character ISO 9660 mode 3, which EVERY cd drive faster than 2x has. Looking at my 2k pro cd, I can’t seem to find stuff that is more than 32 characters deep. Everything is in 8.3 format in the i386 dir, with short names. Perhaps this is the flaw we’re all seeing with XP cd’s?
Shawn.
Someone gave me a copy of XP Pro copied with Nero, which obviously gave the manifest error! I made an image file from it with CD Mate, replaced the controls.man in WinIso. Saved it and renamed to .bin. (No ISO files used). Burnt new CD with CD Mate using standard settings (including burning at max speed). Then installed XP using the usual FCKGW… key, and it worked fine. Simple as a pimple. Many thanks for the file!
Thnx Richard…had some difficulties just copying the CD to hd, but put some muscle into it and forced it to work. Copy-paste-drag-n-drop, replace… Burned the new CD using Nero 5.5.5.6 with no hitches. Now my $%&$ CD Key won’t work, BAAAAHHHHH!!! >:( Yes, I love MSFT… Thanks for the resource nonetheless.
hey i have this problem with windows xp rebooted after showing the logo load up screen…it just stops there i can’t get into my system, recently my computer came up to a pop-up screen that says it’s missing the asms file or folder i guess…does anyone know what i can do to fix it? ..it started out with just a modem prob, because my sister updated our modem and i happen to click roll back because it said it would go back to the most recent driver for our modem but i ended up with a landslcable connection..i thought i could replace the file because our original os is win me and i decided to use the recovery cd..well that made it worse, it kept goin to safe mode and the other choices in the black screen… then i tried to repair the console now it just reboots.. finally i got to that screen, in the installation part which is sayin missing asms or something like that, i can’t really elaborate on that part much…sorry.. i’m on my friends computer right now.. but if anyone could help mne out that be GREAT! i would reformat, but there are important documents that i need for school..
Can anyone tell me if the following content is right in the “vcrtl.man” file ? I am getting the manifest parse error for this file and not for the “controls.man” file:
<?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”UTF-8″
standalone=”yes”?><assembly xmlns=”urn:schemas-microsoft-com:asm.v1″
manifestVersion=”1.0″> <assemblyIdentity
type=”win32″ name=”Microsoft.Tools.VisualCPlusPlus.Runtime-Libraries”
version=”6.0.0.0″ processorArchitecture=”x86″
publicKeyToken=”6595b64144ccf1df”/>
<dependency
optional=”yes”>
<dependentAssembly>
<assemblyIdentity type=”win32″
name=”Microsoft.Tools.VisualCPlusPlus.Runtime-Libraries.Resources”
version=”6.0.0.0″ processorArchitecture=”x86″ publicKeyToken=”6595b64144ccf1df”
language=”*”/>
</dependentAssembly>
</dependency>
<file name=”mfc42u.dll”
hash=”d9357dbe54a1f754cd8d662323acdeb100a0b0d1″
hashalg=”SHA1″> <comClass
description=”Font Property Page”
clsid=”{0BE35200-8F91-11CE-9DE3-00AA004BB851}”/>
<comClass description=”Color Property Page”
clsid=”{0BE35201-8F91-11CE-9DE3-00AA004BB851}”/>
<comClass description=”Picture Property Page”
clsid=”{0BE35202-8F91-11CE-9DE3-00AA004BB851}”/>
</file> <file name=”mfc42.dll”
hash=”138a2057b090678d865720ed22276b00ede39168″
hashalg=”SHA1″/> <file name=”atl.dll”
hash=”60f116cba40bf191e78dd71177de8de79d79c50b”
hashalg=”SHA1″> <comClass
description=”Registrar Class” clsid=”{44EC053A-400F-11D0-9DCD-00A0C90391D3}”
progid=”ATL.Registrar”/>
<typelib tlbid=”{44EC0535-400F-11D0-9DCD-00A0C90391D3}” version=”1.0″
helpdir=””/> </file>
<file name=”msvcp60.dll” hash=”0d48860c3fdc649067ae29ef95635443d9d7064d”
hashalg=”SHA1″/>
<comInterfaceExternalProxyStub name=”IAxWinAmbientDispatch”
iid=”{B6EA2051-048A-11D1-82B9-00C04FB9942E}”
proxyStubClsid32=”{00020424-0000-0000-C000-000000000046}” numMethods=”35″
baseInterface=”{00000000-0000-0000-C000-000000000046}”/>
</assembly>