How to manually intervene during setup?

Thread was moved from "General Discussions > User Solutions and Workarounds" to "Parallels Desktop for Mac > Windows Guest OS Discussion".
Stacey M

I want to manually edit my virtual machine's hard disk partway through a Windows XP setup. This is to compensate for a bug in XP installations, which is not the fault of Parallels.

For anyone curious, it's the notorious bug where after the first reboot, when it says 39 minutes to go and is showing blurb screens, setup suddenly pretends that the directory d:\i386\asms is not on the CD. It is, of course, and other programs can read it.

There are several known workarounds that Microsoft has documented. All of them involve getting into some operating environment other than the setup program and doing some manipulation like hand-copying the directory from the CD to the hard disk.

What are the (easiest) steps I could follow to get some kind of write access to the hard disk image from some working operating environment while partway through XP's setup?

 

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How would you do it if you were installing windblows natively, and not in a vm?
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I'd boot the half-installed machine with a DOS disk and hand-copy things.

Fortunately I'm in business without the workaround, having gotten hold of a more recent XP that doesn't have the same bug.