BugBear
After reading The Error Message Collection, I'm glad to know I'm not the only one who often stares in wonder at the computer screen and tries to fathom out the thinking that went into crafting some of the more obscure errors.
A favourite of mine happens with NT 4.0. Not all installations, just one or two (which makes the exact cause hard to track down).
I occasionally have the need to format floppy disks. The easiest way to do this is to right click on the A icon and select Format from the menu. Upon right clicking on the icon, NT attempts to read the drive. With the disk being unformatted, it fails. A requester appears informing you that the disk is not formatted. The requester doesn't give you the option of formatting and because it has grabbed focus, the menu disappears.
It is therefore impossible to format the disk because the disk is unformatted...
Dropping down to DOS solves the problem, but I can't really see the wisdom in having to read the disk before bringing up a standard menu.
Submitted by: Craig Wright
This is on a par with the system's inability to recognize that removable media might actually have been removed. That is, when a floppy disk has been removed from Drive A: (or B:) why does the system keep reporting that Drive A: cannot be read?
Probably the same cause but definitely bad error trapping.
BTW: for those who may wonder, the title -- BugBear -- is Craig's. This particular piece of technicalese is sometimes rendered as 'bug-a-bear', 'bug-a-boo' or 'boogie', with the exact terminology varying from region to region.
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