When an error is reported to you it is either described as a phrase such as “The Disk is full” or the less friendly “error -34” form. Rarely do you see the name of the error “dskFullErr”. But Apple uses the error name as the basis for identifying and organizing the error lists.
Black & Bleu’s error database is organized around the assumption that each error has a unique name. That way, errors that use the same number as other errors can be distinguished from each other. There are hundreds of cases where an error number is used over again by the Mac OS to mean different things.
Each error name is a string of letters (and possibly numbers and/or symbols) that is different from every other name. That is, no two error names are identical. Mostly, Apple has followed this naming convention.
There are some exceptions to the naming convention that we have encountered. They are described in the next paragraphs of this chapter.
Duplicate Error Names
There are a few names that have been used twice and assigned different error numbers. These are:
– badComponentInstance
– badComponentSelector
– fidExists
– kOutOfMemoryErr
– telNoTools
In order for Black & Bleu™ to distinguish between these names, we have altered the second occurrence of the name slightly by adding the number “1” on the end. Thus, you will find the following in the database:
badComponentInstance (-32767) and
badComponentInstance1 (-2147450879)
These refer to the same error condition.
badComponentSelector (-32766) and
badComponentSelector1 (-2147450878)
These refer to the same error condition.
fidExists (-1301) and
fidExists1 (-132)
These refer to the same error condition.
kOutOfMemoryErr (3001) and
kOutOfMemoryErr1 (2001)
These refer to the same error condition.
telNoTools (-10101) and
telNoTools1 (8)
These refer to the same error condition.
Errors with no Name
There are a total of 59 errors in the database that were assigned an error number but never given a name. It is unclear why no names were given to these errors. However, we have assigned our own names to them.
We selected the names:
– none001 through
– none059
to represent these errors.
Errors with a Proprietary Name
There are 2 errors in the database that have been declared “proprietary” by Apple. These errors have been assigned names but due to the terms of a non-disclosure agreement we signed with Apple, we cannot reveal them.