Macintosh Error of Type -412
Published: Wednesday, 12th June 2019
I had a little “blast from the past” the other evening when moving files around on my main OS9 battlestation. I was shifting 6GB of folders full of files and software from one SSD to another and all was going well for the first few gigabytes until it suddenly stopped with the following error message:
Error of type -412! WTF? I’ve actually run into this headache before, back in 2014 or so when I was knee-deep in my trawl through several hundred Macintosh magazine cover CDs, duplicating shareware games and utils off (which makes up most of the vintageapplemac.com software archive). Back then, I was stumped, as I could find no reference to a “type -412” error in any Macintosh error code list, and Google wasn’t very helpful either, returning only a handful of results, most of which being people saying “WTF?”…
In detail, the error occurred when transferring batches of data (uncompressed files/folders, it didn’t happen with items that were stuffed and zipped) from one drive (CD or hard disk) to another. The odd thing was that it seemed to only occur with some files; other files would happily transfer to the destination drive after the error window was closed and I tried again. There was always bags of space left in the drives/partitions that I was transferring to, so that wasn’t the issue. Eventually, I formatted a new partition on a different drive in the machine and dumped the shareware I had already hauled from the CD collection to it without issue, and was able to resume and complete my task with the remaining disks. The drive that I was originally copying to, the one that started throwing up the -412 error, already had a large amount of stuff on it, so I drew the conclusion that I had hit some kind of OS9 “maximum number of files” limit, although I wasn’t 100% convinced due to some files still being able to be copied to it. Whatever, I had managed to duplicate all of the software I wanted to so I stopped thinking about it and moved on.
Until now, five years later, and it’s happening again! Taking a dive back into Google to try and find some definitive answers is still a frustrating experience, with a few disparate cries for help scattered across the last 15 or so years of the web, all of which are met with near-bafflement from other users. Interestingly, though, is that in the handful of results returned today are a couple of mentions of “Finder comments”. The most illuminating of these is this message on Apple’s support forum from a user called Hiroto:
If my memory serves me, undocumented error -412 is often related to excessive number of comments, that is shown in Finder’s Get Info window, in a volume.
I guess that the number of Finder’s comments in a volume (under OS9?) may not exceed 65535 (or 32767 ?), because Finder’s comment id field in HFS/HFS Plus catalog file data is defined as SInt16.
That sounds rational and, indeed, removing comments resolves the issue! All of the other people reporting this issue were engaged n the same activity as me; moving large amounts of files around in OS9. I think it’s probably fair to presume that, when OS9 was put together in the late 90s, Apple’s engineers didn’t expect many folk to have 100GB+ hard drives jammed full of hundreds of thousands of files that they’d try and move around to other 100GB+ drives. The relative lack of people complaining about the issue suggests that it was not unreasonable for these engineers to not predict the problem and iron it out. I do find it interesting, though, that the error code itself is undocumented. Does that mean that “error of type -412” is some kind of generic catch-all fallback code for unanticipated oddities rather than a genuine, thought-out identifier of a specific issue? Food for thought.
So, there we go, I feel as informed as I’m likely to get. The solution, then, is twofold, imo; 1) remove comments and/or 2) duplicate large amounts of files into new partitions/volumes rather than ones that already have a bunch of stuff in.
If any reader can shed any more info, please do leave a comment. This article will join the other shout-outs for “Error Of Type -412” in Google’s index, and I hope it helps enlighten another stumped Classic Macintosh enthusiast in the future!
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I had this happen too on a large drive (190 gb) I was copying thousands of files to. In particular, I was ripping thousands of files from Shareware CD ROMs. It began with random -412 errors, and after a while a sudden and big -60 error appeared: bad master directory block, unrepairable by Disk Utility. I booted in OSX and quickly backupped the drive. I then partitioned it in smaller chunks (60 gb each) and spread the files over these partitions. Problem solved. It indeed looks like the classic MacOS (9) cannot handle big drives with hundred thousands of files.… Read more »