A novel adaptive fault-tolerant control for unknown robotic manipulators with actuator faults is studied in this paper to achieve given transient and steady-state performance. In order to satisfy the requirement of preset performance specifications for manipulators in engineering applications, especially the index of prescribed precision within given time, an error transformation is constructed and embedded in the backstepping analysis through Barrier Lyapunov Function(BLF). Adaptive laws and fault estimator are designed respectively to process the dynamic uncertainties and unknown failures including partial loss of effectiveness and additive fault. Finally, the boundedness of closed-loop system's signals is proved, and the verification is given by the simulations on a 2-DOF manipulator.