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.
Wow… Thank you!!!
I was having so many problems installing Xp on a friends computer, til I found Richard!
Your idea to make the new Control.man file and burn a new cd.. I did this using nero by selecting burn disk at once and all was bootable fun after that.
Something else I did was also do the copying all of I386 into a Folder on C:I386 as stated in one of the posts on your site.. with a link to windowz. This came in handy when during final fazes the computer could not find the files it was looking for on my cd, for some reason, It could find them on the hard drive..
All is happy and good now.. as I stare at the god awful desk top that I am so happy to see, who knows what XP was thinking with the rolling hills, but happy to see them now! Thanks Richard and fellow posters! Hopefully my experience will help someone else
Kissed
As stated above, the fix for the ‘Line 4’ error is to replace ALL of the files in the controls directory. I used some from an XP Home CD I had, and it worked perfectly.
I cant get the updated CD to boot. Where do I put the boot.img file?
TD
dear friends, thank you so much to all who povided such a comprehensive page and hëll to MS with such a hating product!!
I have a Fujitsu/Siemence C series notebook. I tried to reinstall win xp with the original winxp CD_ROM I had(it was included with notebook) I got the error message of manifest mising for msm5100…. directory and i tried most likely all the solution mentioned above. copying a new image with winiso, copying to HD, copying the tree to Floppy and i’m still unsuccesfull. my HD is NTFS formatted and the installation goes till 35% and then a blue page that I can’t read comes and stay just for 1 second and then reboot and it repeats again and again and again. what that just can I do is going to command line during the installation by clicking SHIFT&F10. i’m really frustrated and dieing. i rush all the sites and i tried to install more than 100 times during last 40 hours. i need my data on HDD. please help me freinds, thank you so much to all.
I had the same problem on a copied XP Pro CD. Clean install on a A7N8X-X
I found the CONTROL.MAN was 1742 bytes of some binary and mostly blank data. Replacing it with the XML above did the trick.
None of the other XML MAN files were blank.
Since I had to burn the CD again, I took the opportunity to include a few keys and a keygen proggy.
Thanks everyone who’s added their knowledge to this page, it ranks high on Google.
First I want to say thanks for this page. It was a great help.
The solution I found to this problem was to take the ISO image file I had and extract it with ISO Buster. Then I burned all of the files to a CD at 4x (it may actually work at a higher speed but I didn’t want to add to my pile of coasters). It seems that whenever I burned a CD from the ISO the controls.man file was corrupt. When I burned it from all of the extracted files it was fine.
If you are unable to extract the actual ISO, another solution would be like was suggested earlier and copy the entire CD contents to the HD. Chances are, if the commons.man file is corrupted, that an error will occur in the process (so be forewarned). Once the CD contents are on your HD, delete the commons.man file that is there and create a new one with the contents above. Then burn from the HD files you have and you will hopefully be good to go.
GL, HF, and thanks again.
Hi there
This guy is writing to you from Israel, I came across the phenomenon exactly the way that Richard described it at the top – while trying to install XP on a blank machine. Went to check the file – indeed distorted, replaced with the suggested xml text, burned everything into a new CD, boot the PC with new CD and BINGO! everything’s perfect.
All thanks to the good souls here – I especially want to express my gratitude to Richard who saved me a very nervous night.
One think I want to point out which was not mentioned before: all MS knowledge base links that people mentioned above point to articles that are not really relevant to the problem as described by Richard. When searching the database specifically for the “Manifest Parse error”, MS’s search engine *interestingly* finds you this thing:
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;331881
I leave you all to see what’s MS’s suggestion in that case – definitely speaks for itself!
Cheers & GL!
HEELLPP!!!
This seems to be the only website i have found that has an idea of the sort of knowledge base to help me with my predicament. I was running on windows XP pro after updrading from ME. I foolishly took my PC into PC WORLD for it`s health check and had a new hard drive added. Perfect until i got it home. Firstly it was missing it`s SYSTEM32.Config file, now after deleting prtitions and reformating C: drive it will not let me reinstall XP saying that the C: Drive is corrupt and you cannot proceed with the installation. It will however let me install the Ghost CD of ME that came with my PC. I`m fed up with the crashes already with ME and want my XP pro back. Can anyone help???
Stuart
Thankyou, Thankyou, Thankyou!
Used your text from the start for controls.man
Created a cd with just the i386 directory, poped it in just after winXP restarted setup(after the obligatory parse error and reboot) and the install went along like it was DESIGNED for a two disc set.
Now to add the other 1/2 gig of memory to make my new os a happy camper 😎
can anyone send me CONTROLS.MAN file but not of folder 6000 but of foler 60100. I would appretiate if anyone could send me the file in my email as soon as possible my email is sachindra@mountdigit.com
Thanks,
I’m having the gdiplus.man problem, but the thing is, I only ran setup so i could repair some files, and now I can’t finish booting my computer without setup trying to run again.
Is there not any way to just keep setup from continuing and get back into my machine?
A very helpfull thread. Didnt help me to solve the CONTROLS.MAN problem here but it showed me what it wasn’t. The computer is a Dell C600. Everything above was tried but to no avail. I knew my burn(ed) XP ISO’s were OK but still the parse error. Eventually I got XP to install by deleting the suspend to disk partition. A flawless install followed.
ALL YOU NEED IS A DIFFERENT COPY OF XP! THATS IT! TRUST ME!
FYI… after reading this post and feeling too lazy to copy and burn another CD, I simply put the controls.man file on a floppy disk in the appropriate i386 directory structure. Then all I had to do was remove the install CD, let the installation restart and point it to the floppy drive. Once it got past that point, it prompted me for the CD again and I put the install disk back in the drive and… wala!
Absolutely Genius … It’s now at least a year after this thread was started and I am thrilled that I was able to use the “Floppy” method to get my software going ….
Thanks Richard !!
~oh yeah.. floppy solution all the way~
MY BAD>> IT WAS LENI WHO CAME UP WITH IT!! sry!
This is just my experience…
I just came across the SXS.DLL manifest error for the first time. This might not be the same solution for everyone, but for me it was a hardware problem. After I swapped out memory and a CD drive I had no problems with XP. This is the same CD stored in a jewel case that I’ve used numerous times before. Likewise I had similar blue screen and install problems on the same system attempting a W2K install. Therefore, for all those frustrated while trying to get a clean XP install, try changing memory modules. IT’s worth a shot.
Matt
I came across this page last night while I was trying to get round the same problem. The floppy drive in my spare pc is dead and I didn’t want to mess around getting my cd burner set up (I was reinstalling my main pc), so decided to try to hack it… and here’s how I managed it:
1. remove installation cd and reboot. wait for setup to start
2. press shift-F10 asap after setup starts
3. when dialog box appears with “insert XP cd”, move it to one side & ignore it for now
4. examine problematic file in cmd window – on my cd, the files seemed fine (use “type controls.man | more” or, in my case, “type vcrtl.man”) – maybe some people suffer more corruption that I did…
5. put cd back in drive (but DON’T click OK on the “insert XP cd” dialog)
6. create a new directory c:i386 and cd into it. Use “xcopy /e d:i386 .” to copy installation files from cd onto drive C. Check file still looks ok in the new copy.
7. go back to “insert XP cd” dialog and make it look in c:i386.
8. Wait a short while. It had a problem finding “nt5.cab” (I think that’s what it was called, I’m doing this from memory), so at this point I reinserted the XP cd.
9. Installation continued from here and completed successfully!
Good luck to anyone who decides to try this… worked well for me and saved me having to burn another cd
Thank you Google! Thank you Richard! Thank you whoever posted the “floppy method”. I almost lost my mind when I got this error…Googled it for the hëll of it and found this page. XP is up and running smoothly.
THANK YOU
Ok, I was trying to reformat my computer and do a fresh install of a pirated copy of XP PRO, but it would not let me delete the partion so I had to install over my old version so windows could run again, I ran into the manifest error this is how you fix it quick and easy.
1.Borrow a legitimate copy of XP Home or Pro.
2.Get a blank floppy disk.
3.explore your CD drive when you have the legitimate copy in.
4. the control.man file should be located somewhere like
D:I386/ASMS/6000/MSFT/WINDOWS/COMMON/CONTROLS/
All the files needed are in there,
5. copy all the folders above onto the floppy disk, but only the folders not the files inside!(it would probably be easier if you just made new folders and named them appropriately)
The 3 files in the controls folder are the most important thing, directly copy the CONTROLS folder into the COMMON folder.
6. Boot up the computer with NO CD in the drive, it will ask for you to insert the windows XP pro cd, hit ok but DO NOT ENTER THE CD.
after you hit ok it should show you
D:/I386 or something, change that to A:/I386 and hit Ok.
it will run for a while and voila it takes the needed files, after it will ask for the XP Pro cd again so pop it in and continue the install, it may ask for some other files but just hit cancel and it will ask if you want to just continue installing anyway.
Good luck hope this helped because I could barely understand the other explainations.
I am another one with the problem of upgrading to Windows XP Pro,a handfull of files “cannot be downloaded” from the burned cd and after skipping these files,i get “components file does not match the verification info present in the components manifest”. Problem is,i fix cars for a living,and was looking for the simplest solution for a dummy like me. Thank You.
OK, I have yet another stupid question re installation of XP. Maybe someone here knows.
I have a ‘reinstallation CD’ for XP Pro from Dell that came with a laptop I bought. I’m wiping the laptop and installing another OS on it. Can I use the reinstallation CD on another, non-Dell machine, or will it fail?
Many thanks to all of you who took the time to help; by your success stories and by your expertise. Like many of you who took the time to comment because you found answers at this wonderful site I offer my experience in exchange for what you gave me. Thank you Mr. Richard.
The only error message I ever got, after 8 burned CDs, 20 pages of instructions and three days of frustration was: SXS.dll syntax error in manifest or policy file “E:I386ASMS6000MSFTVCRTLVCRTL.MAN” on line 16.
The solution. I copied the entire I386 folder(1) from the installation CD to my hdd, used Nero to burn the entire folder to another CD(2) and named the folder for the hdd C:I386. I named CD-ROM drive folder G:I386(3). I began the installation from my DVD drive and the installation continued until it automatically shut down and restarted. Seconds after the restart, XP stopped and displayed the above error message. I warm booted the computer, took the installation disk out and waited for XP to display the “cannot find files of indicate where the files may be found” message or something similar.
I Change the offered file location to the location where I had saved the I386 folder. For this drive it was C:I386. XP copied the files and displayed a menu prompting me to place the XP installation back in the drive. Seconds later the installation was complete. Hours later I am beyound words in attempting to thank all of you. I plead with those of you who have been helped by this site to add your successful experience. An aside. If you are considering purchasing an ASUS Motherboard, be aware of their support service. Their resellers claim they have no knowledge about the product and email to ASUS.com is three days out with no response.
If I were to say thank you a million times it would not be enough. Interestingly my retail copy of XP Pro Corp SP1 (got it on the first day it was released) gave it up on the second time I tried to re-install. Fortunately I found this site and it saved my life. I downloaded the Common.man from above. After copying XP to my hard drive I over wrote the file and burned the disk contents using Nero Burning Rom without finalizing. My burner is a Verbatium 24/10/40 and I am happy to say that it did the trick. Installation stalled at 39 minutes remaing and then the error message(s). Can you imagine my delight when the install continued? YES! Thanks again for the correct fix.