AMIGA ERRORS - BOOT-UP COLOURS, GURUS, DOS ERRORS, RETURN CODES by Robert Gill This is a fairly complete compilation of the common errors on the Amiga. There is a description of them and as many as possible of the possible error codes (where applicable). POWER UP SCREEN When you power up your Amiga the screen will change through a few shades of grey to white so long as everything is OK. When the screen changes from black to dark grey, you know the processor is up and running. A light grey means that the ROMs are OK. White means that the RAM is OK and the system is ready. If this doesn't happen (ie another colour) it is probably one of the following: Red, a ROM error. Green, usually a chip RAM error, but with some A500's a lose fat agnus will cause this to happen (it decodes the chip RAM addresses). Blue, an error in one of the custom chips. Yellow, an errror before the error trapping is functional. This can be caused by many things. If the computer thinks there is ram somewhere, when there isn't and then tries to write to it this will happen. GURU MEDITATIONS. Probably all Amiga owners have seen the guru at one time or another. The guru meditation is what your Amiga does when the low level error trapping routines catch an error before the computer crashes. When the higher-level routines detect the error you are given a requestor saying: 'Software Failure. Task held. Finish ALL disk activity', with two gadgets saying retry and cancel. Retry usually does nothing and cancel causes a guru. The proper term for the guru is an alert. The alerts give you some useful information about why the Amiga crashed and what program caused the crash. FORMAT OF ALERT ERROR NUMBER : #DSGeCode.TADDRESS The different parts of the error number are as follows: D : This indicates whether or not the software failure is recoverable or not (with the current OS none are really). A zero means that it is recoverable and any non-zero value means that it isn't. S : This (together with D) indicates the subsystem that generated the alert. The various subsystems are (DS) : 00 .. Processor or none 10 .. Audio.device 01 .. Exec.Library 11 .. Console.device 02 .. Graphics.Library 12 .. GamePort.device 03 .. Layers.Library 13 .. Keyboard.device 04 .. Intuition.Library 14 .. Trackdisk.device 05 .. Math.library 15 .. Timer.device 06 .. Clist.library 07 .. DOS.library 20 .. CIA.resource 08 .. RAM.library 21 .. Disk.resource 09 .. Icon.library 22 .. Misc.resource 0A .. Expansion.library 30 .. Bootstrap 31 .. Workbench 32 .. Diskcopy Ge : This indicates the general error. Basically telling you what went wrong. The various defined General Errors are (Ge) : 01 .. No memory 05 .. Open Resident 02 .. Make Library 06 .. I/O Error 03 .. open Library 07 .. No Signal 04 .. Open Device Code : This gives more detail as to what went wrong. The value that appears here depends on the subsystem and general error. TAddress : This is the Address of the task that caused the guru (where applicable). Quite often the processor will trap an error. The operating system will then display a guru. These errors will only contain two digits (the right- most two digits in 'Code') and their meanings are: 00 .. Reset (SP). \ Technically, these shouldn't occur, but they 01 .. Reset (PC). / do pop up occasionally. 02 .. Bus Error. 03 .. Address Error. A word or Long Word access was attempted on an odd address boundary. 04 .. Illegal Instruction. A program probably made a jump to somewhere it shouldn't have. 05 .. Divide by zero. A program has attempted to divide a number by zero (a mathematical impossibility). 06 .. CHK instruction. 07 .. TRAPV instruction. Overflow. 08 .. Privilege Violation. A program in user mode attempted to execute a privileged instruction. 09 .. Trace. Used in some debugging. 0A .. A Line Emulation. \ Used with some coprocessors. Usually the 0B .. F Line Emulation. / program is out of control. 0C .. \ These are reserved by Motorola. Any program causing these to 17 .. / is probably out of control. 18 .. Spurious Interrupt. 19 .. Auto-Vector \ These should not happen as the OS uses them to to 1F .. Interrupts. / detect what is going on with the hardware, but as with all others they do appear sometimes. 20 .. Trap \ Usually a program is out of control. to 2F .. Vectors / 30 .. \ These are reserved by Motorola. Any program causing these to 3F .. / is probably out of control. 40 .. User Interrupt \ Usually a program is out of control. to FF .. Vectors / AMIGADOS ERROR NUMBERS These are the error codes generated by AmigaDOS. These numbers will appear in CLI windows, the workbench title bar and some other programs. They mainly deal with file and disk access problems. [Ed: See the card that came with Megadisc 7 for a listing of these as well.] 103 .. INSUFFICIENT FREE STORE. Usually there is not enough free memory, but sometimes the may be not enough of a certain type of memory (eg CHIP, FAST), Or the free memory may be too fragmented for the program to use. 104 .. TASK TABLE FULL. There are too many tasks running. 120 .. INVALID ARGUMENT. Usually there are too many characters, but it can also be caused by invalid parameters. 121 .. FILE IS NOT AN OBJECT MODULE. The file you attempted to run was not executable. Either it was not a program in the first place or it had been damaged. 122 .. INVALID LIBRARY. A resident library that was accessed was invalid, nonexistent or unavailable for some reason. 202 .. OBJECT IN USE. Something is using the file you want to access. This can happen when a directory has a volume name assigned to it (eg DEVS:, FONTS: etc) 203 .. OBJECT ALREADY EXISTS. You attempted to write a file or a directory with the name of one that already exists. 204 .. DIRECTORY NOT FOUND. An attempt was made to access a non - existent directory. 205 .. OBJECT NOT FOUND. An attempt was made to access a non - existent Object. This can be caused by specifying incorrect paths. 206 .. INVALID WINDOW. An attempt was made to open an invalid window. 210 .. INVALID STREAM COMPONENT NAME. An incorrect filename was specified. This is usually caused by the inclusion in the name of an invalid character. 212 .. OBJECT NOT OF REQUIRED TYPE. This is often caused by icons that do not match their associated files, or renaming, rather than relabeling a disk. 213 .. DISK NOT VALIDATED. The disk has not been validated for one of the following reasons: L:Disk-Validator was unavailable. The disk was write protected. The disk contained unrecoverable errors. The disk was removed while the Amiga was getting info about the disk. 214 .. DISK WRITE PROTECTED. The write protect tab of a disk is in the 'protect' position instead of the 'enable' position. 215 .. INVALID RENAME ATTEMPTED. Usually an attempt was made to rename a file from one disk to another. eg : RENAME DF0:turkey RAM:buzzard 216 .. DIRECTORY NOT EMPTY. An attempt was made to delete a directory that was not empty. 218 .. DEVICE NOT MOUNTED. An attempt was made to access a device that was not mounted, or sometimes, not fully validated. 220 .. COMMENT TO LARGE. A comment (filenote) over 80 chars was specified. 221 .. DISK FULL. There is no space on the disk. 222 .. FILE IS PROTECTED FROM DELETION. An attempt was made to delete a file that has a delete status of undeletable. 223 .. FILE IS PROTECTED FROM WRITING. An attempt was made to write to a file that has a writeability status of unwritable. 224 .. FILE IS PROTECTED FROM READING. An attempt was made to read a file that has a readability status of unreadable. 225 .. NOT A DOS DISK. Either the disk is: Not formatted. A Kickstart Disk. Has a custom bootblock (common with games). (Maybe an FFS disk under the old filesystem.) 226 .. NO DISK IN DRIVE. An attempt was made to access a drive containing no disk. A requestor asking for the insertion of a disk is usually displayed first. RETURN CODES These are generated by user software (usually run from the CLI). They fall into a few broad categories, but often have slightly differing meanings between programs. up to 0 .. All OK 0 - 4 .. OK 5 - 9 .. WARN 10 up .. FAIL (The value of FAIL can be redefined with the FAILAT command.) If a program is run from a batch file and gives a return code of FAIL, execution of that batch file will cease.