Troubleshooting the Software: Miscellaneous

What is a Type XXX error?

What is A/ROSE?

Easy access: one answer, many questions

How can I keep mulitple system folders on one hard disk?

What is a Type XXX error?

A Type error is your Macintosh's way of telling you that it's sick and plans to take a nice vacation in Belview for a few days. Among developers Type errors are officially known as DS errors where DS stands for "Deep Spaghetti" though a somewhat more colorful expression is often used in place of "Spaghetti." Your applications are toast. Any unsaved data is lost. Once you've been hit with a Type error there's absolutely nothing you can do about it. You'll probably need to restart your Macintosh either by hitting the programmer's key or by turning the Mac off and on if the programmer's key isn't installed.

The most common type errors are Type 1 and Type 3. Type 1 is a bus error. It's most commonly symptomatic of software that isn't 32-bit clean. A Type 3 error is an illegal instruction. It's most often symptomatic of poorly written software. You may occasionally be able to avoid Type 1 errors by turning 32-bit addressing on or off or by turning the cache on or off if you have a 68040 Mac. Otherwise there is almost nothing you can do about these errors except try to find out what actions, applications, and/or extensions cause them so you can report them to the programmer and avoid them in the future. There is no point posting about Type errors to the net.

What is A/ROSE?

A/ROSE by any other name would still generate as much pointless net traffic. Apple's Realtime Operating System Environment is not needed by 99.9% of the people who stumble across it. It's only needed if you have an MCP NuBus card of which there were about six at last count. The only even moderately common one is Apple's short Ethernet NuBus card. If you don't have such a card, feel free to trash A/ROSE.

Easy access: one answer, many questions

asy Access is a WONDERFUL system extension from Apple, useful for far more than its intended purpose. Unfortunately it's also the source of a lot of confusion and strange behavior on many Macs. It's even been suggested that anti-virals should detect and report the presence of Easy Access since it produces more false virus reports than any other software in Macintosh history. If you're using System 7, your Mac will emit an ascending whistle for about two seconds when Easy Access is turned on and a descending whistle when Easy Access is turned off. You may also hear a beep after some keypresses.

Easy Access has two pieces, Sticky Keys, which is turned on by hitting the Shift key five times in a row without moving the mouse, and Mouse Keys which is turned on by hitting Command-Shift-Clear. Sticky Keys lets you type things like Command-Shift-Clear without doing the Rose Mary Wood shuffle. Just hit the modifer keys you want to use and then hit the regular key. For example if Sticky Keys is turned on, you could also turn on Mouse Keys by typing Command, then Shift, then Clear rather than by hitting them all at once. When Sticky Keys is turned on an icon appears in the menu bar to the right of the application icon/menu. Mouse Keys lets the numeric keypad substitute for the mouse. This is especially useful for making precision, single-pixel adjustments in draw and paint programs and for safely shutting down or restarting your computer when the mouse is frozen.

How can I keep mulitple system folders on one hard disk?

y far the best way is to divide your disk into multiple partitions, one partition for each system folder. Then use your formatting software to select the partition to boot from. This will, however, trash everything on your hard disk so back up first. Soft partitions like those created by Norton Utilities and other utility packages are not nearly as reliable or safe for your data as hard partitions created by a disk formatter like Drive7.

If you don't want to repartition your hard drive, you can keep compressed archives of system folders you might want to use on your hard disk. To switch system folders you'll need to boot off a floppy or a second hard disk, trash the old system folder, and uncompress the new one. Just be sure that when you boot your Mac there's not more than one uncompressed System Folder on any one drive.

Finally if you absolutely must keep multiple, bootable system folders on the same hard disk, Keisuke Hara's freeware System Switcher 1.1 or Kevin Aitken's System Picker 1.0.1 will adjust the boot blocks of the hard disk so you can pick which one your Mac will boot off from. See

If you put a copy in the Startup Items folder of your System 7 system folder, and specify it as a startup item in System 6, then whenever you start up you'll be offered a choice of systems.

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Much of the information contained herein has been extracted from Elliotte M. Harold's incredible FAQ lists. We thank and commend him for his invaluable service to the Macintosh world.