Abort, Retry, Fail?
computer error message
"Abort, Retry, Fail?" (or "Abort, Retry, Ignore?") is an error message found in DOS operating systems, which prompts the end-user for a course of action to follow. Although an improvement over CP/M, the message has been cited as an example of poor usability in computer user interfaces.
Background
In CP/M, attempting to read a floppy disk drive with the door open would hang until a disk was inserted and the disk drive door was closed (very early disk hardware did not send any kind of signal until a disk was spinning, and a timeout to detect the lack of signal required too much code on these tiny systems). Many users of CP/M became accustomed to this as a method of managing multiple disks, by opening the disk drive to stop a program from reading or writing a file until the correct disk could be inserted.
A primary design consideration for PC DOS was that software written for CP/M be portable to DOS without changes. Even the first IBM PC had hardware that told the operating system that the disk drive door was open, but returning an error to software would require the software to be rewritten to handle the error. Still, it was desirable to improve the experience, in particular by giving the user a way to get out of the hang without having to find a disk to insert in the drive. The prompt was invented for this reason.
Similarly, CP/M would repeatedly read or write a disk sector as long as there was an error. Often the only way out of this was to change the disk to another (it would then read something random off the new disk).
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Abort, Retry, Fail?” is computer error message. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Abort, Retry and Fail, not as a finished interpretation.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 12, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q3618161. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference.
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This entry incorporates text from “Abort, Retry, Fail?” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.