Abort, Retry, Fail?

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This article is about an error message. For an EP of this title by White Town, see Abort, Retry, Fail? (EP).

Abort, Retry, Fail? is a catch-all error message displayed by MS-DOS when it is unable to read necessary data from media.

The message would prompt the user to hit "A" to abort the operation, "R" to try reading the data again, or "F" to attempt to proceed without the necessary data. Since it would not allow the user to proceed unless they picked one of the three options, and because usually none of the options would result in any progress, it has become programmer parlance for uncompromising, vague error messages.

The only option that offered any hope of a solution was Retry since it would attempt to retry the previous operation. If a storage device was starting to become corrupt, the result would be variable, so Retry might just work. Fail would just tell the application that it could not complete the operation (in which case, the user would have to seek an alternative means of accomplishing his task), and Abort was supposed to stop the application (the user could choose this if he got completely fed up).

Sometimes, this message would be Abort, Retry, Ignore, Fail? This often made no difference in the ability to make any progress. The Ignore option would just hand some 'default' data back to the application that requested the operation, and the user would have to hope that this 'default' data would not interfere with the operation of the program (although usually, it would).

[edit] Legacy

Abort, Retry, Fail? became so common that it crossed over into the domain of popular culture:

  • In 1996, White Town released an EP called Abort, Retry, Fail?.
  • PC Magazine used the term as the title of its column highlighting humorous computer-related errors, before renaming it "Backspace". Since then, however, the column was once again renamed to "Abort, Retry, Fail?".
  • A quote from Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri reads: "Abort, Retry, Fail?" was the phrase some wormdog scrawled next to the door of the Edit Universe project room. And when the new dataspinners started working, fabricating their worlds on the huge organic comp systems, we'd remind them: if you see this message, always choose "Retry."
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