Screen of death

A Blue Screen of Death as it appears in the Windows 9x family of operating systems

In many computer operating systems, a special type of error message will display onscreen when the system has experienced a fatal error. Computer users have dubbed these messages screens of death as they typically result in unsaved work being lost and often indicate serious problems with the system's hardware or software. Screens of death are usually the result of a kernel panic, although the terms are frequently used interchangeably. Most screens of death are displayed on an even background color with a message advising the user to restart the computer.

Notable screens of death

A Linux Kernel Panic, forced by an attempt to kill init

Mac OS X 10.6 kernel panic

• The Blue Screen of Death (also called BSOD, Stop error, or bluescreen) is a common name for a screen displayed by the Microsoft Windows operating system when a system error occurs.
• A Black Screen of Death is a failure mode of Microsoft Windows 3.x.
• A Red Screen of Death appears in early beta versions of Windows Vista and is also the colour of the fatal error screen on PlayStation consoles.
• The Purple Screen of Death is used by VMware ESX Server, a server virtualization product by VMware, Inc. It is displayed in the event of a fatal kernel error. The screen provides error codes that can be used for debugging purposes.
• A kernel panic is used primarily by Unix and Unix-like operating systems: the Unix equivalent of Microsoft's Blue Screen of Death. It is used to describe a fatal error from which the operating system cannot recover.
• A Sad Mac is a symbol used by older-generation Apple Macintosh computers, starting with the original Macintosh 128K, to indicate a severe hardware or software problem that prevented startup from occurring successfully. A similar symbol exists for the iPod.
• The Bomb icon is a symbol that was displayed when a "classic" Macintosh operating system (pre-Mac OS X) program had an application crash.
• Bomb symbols were also used by the Atari ST line of computers when the system encountered a fatal error. The number of bombs indicated the exact cause of the error.
• Guru Meditation is the name of the error that occurred on early versions of the Amiga computers when they crashed.

Other screens of death

The following refers to screens of death that are not based upon computer operating systems and appear instead in other media.

• A White Screen of Death appears on several different operating systems,^{[citation needed]} CMS^[1] and BIOSes, including Apple iPhones and iPods.^[2]
• A Yellow Screen of Death occurs when an ASP.NET web application encounters a problem and crashes.^[3]

See also

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Screens of death.

• Kill screen

References

1. ↑ "Drupal White Screen of Death". 
2. ↑ Ulanoff, Lance (2006-09-12). "The Apple iPod's White Screen of Death". PCMag.com. Retrieved 2011-05-23. 
3. ↑ Busoli, Simone (November 15, 2007). "ELMAH - Error Logging Modules And Handlers".