This study focuses on an adaptive fault-tolerant boundary control (BC) for a flexible string (FS) in the presence of unknown external disturbances, dead zone, and actuator fault. To tackle these issues, by employing some transformations, a part of the unknown dead zone and external disturbance can be regarded as a composite disturbance. Subsequently, an adaptive fault-tolerant BC is developed by utilizing strict formula derivations to compensate for unknown composite disturbance, dead zone, and actuator fault in the FS system. Under the proposed control strategy, the closed-loop system proves to be uniformly ultimately bounded, and the vibration amplitude is guaranteed to converge ultimately to a small compact set by choosing suitable design parameters. Finally, a numerical simulation is performed to demonstrate the control performance of the proposed scheme.