System crash screen
Black
The black screen of death (BSoD), is either of two things: a failure mode of Microsoft Windows 3.x, or the screen displayed by the OS/2 operating system in the event of either a system error from which it cannot recover or a "hard" error in a program running in "full screen" mode (the former being a serious system failure but the latter being a less serious application failure).
The black screen of death has been present in all versions of OS/2.
The Windows black screen of death
In Windows 3.x the black screen of death is the behaviour that occurred when a DOS application failed to execute properly. It was often known to occur in connection with attempting certain operations while networking drivers were resident in memory. (Most commonly, but not exclusively, it was seen while the Novell NetWare client for DOS, NETX, was loaded.) The system would switch the display to text mode, but would display nothing, leaving the user looking at an entirely black screen with a blinking cursor in the upper left corner. At this point, the user could do nothing but perform a cold reboot to get the system running normally again.
According to Wallace McClure of ASP.net [1], the phrase was originally coined in the summer of 1991 by Ed Brown, a technician with Coca-Cola Company's IT department in Atlanta, GA. He reports that the company was rolling out Windows 3.0 within the Global Marketing group and when the users would attempt to run WordPerfect, they would randomly receive a BSOD.
One can say this screen is the first screen of death to have occurred in computing history. Therefore, it can be given the nickname "Grandpa SoD". But this nickname could only be given once the newer Blue screen of death appeared in Windows 3.1 and Windows NT.
The OS/2 Black screen of death
In OS/2, a black screen of death is either a "TRAP screen" or "full-screen hard-error VIO pop-up". They switch the display adapter to text mode. The display is 80 colums by 25 rows, with white lettering on a black background and a black border, and uses the text mode font of the display adapter.
TRAP screens
A "TRAP screen" occurs when the kernel encounters an error from which it cannot recover, a system crash. Usually this is a result of faulty (or overclocked) hardware, but it may also result from a software error in either the kernel or a device driver.
The "TRAP screen" contains a dump of the processor registers and stack, and information about the version of the operating system and the actual processor exception that was triggered.
The only actions the user can take in this situation is to perform a soft reboot by pressing Control-Alt-Delete or to perform a system dump by pressing Control-Alt-NumLock twice.
Hard error screens A "full-screen hard-error VIO pop-up" occurs when a process incurs a "hard" error, either an outright application program crash or a potentially recoverable hard error (such as an attempt to access a floppy disc device where no disc has been inserted into the drive).
The screen is displayed by the "hard error daemon" process, which handles hard errors from all other processes. Technically, the screen is a "VIO pop-up" screen. All processes (except the one that has incurred the error, any that also incur hard errors whilst the first error is being displayed, and any that themselves wish to display a "VIO pop-up" screen) continue to run, and the system continues to operate as normal. The hard error daemon uses a VIO pop-up when either the system has been booted into text mode or the hard error has occurred in a process running in a full-screen session.
The "pop-up screen" contains information about the processor exception that was triggered and the identity of the process.
The user is prompted for the action to be taken, and may choose
- to end the process,
- to display more information (which comprises a dump of the processor registers and stack for that process),
- to retry the operation (if appropriate — I/O errors are retryable, CPU errors are not), or
- to ignore the problem and continue (if appropriate — I/O errors are ignorable, CPU errors are not).
Green
The Green Screen of Death (GSoD for short) is the name given to failure modes on the TiVo digital video recorder and Microsoft Xbox 360 console game system platforms.
TiVo
The Green Screen of Death (GSoD), sometimes called the Green Screen of Intensive Care to distinguish it from a Microsoft-style Blue Screen of Death is an error message produced by TiVo machines. The causes of it vary, but it is generally regarded as a "good sign" despite its scary appearance. The message is displayed while the TiVo attempts to repair the data contents of its hard drive.
The GSoD text reads as follows:
A severe error has occurred. Please leave the Receiver plugged in and connected to the phone line for the next three hours while the Receiver attempts to repair itself. DO NOT UNPLUG OR RESTART THE RECEIVER. If, after three hours, the Receiver does not restart itself, call Customer Care.
Xbox 360
The Xbox 360 will display a "Screen of Death" if the system experiences a serious error. In such instances the user is prompted to contact Xbox customer support.
Yellow
Mozilla
In Mozilla-based applications, the yellow screen of death is the screen displayed when they encounter an XML parsing error. This typically happens when the XML document that the browser is trying to access is not well-formed, for example when it does not nest tags properly.
The yellow screen of death is common when an author of HTML tries to serve HTML as XHTML, with the recommended MIME type of "application/xhtml+xml", without checking for well-formedness.
When it arises due to a web page error, only the page content area displays the yellow screen of death; the browser chrome is unaffected. However, the entire browser window may be replaced with the yellow screen of death in situations where browser code has caused a parsing error (this is almost always the result of a bug in an extension or an extension incompatibility).
ASP.NET
The yellow screen of death is the colloquial name given to an Exception report screen generated by ASP.NET.
The screen displays the exception message and a stack trace with a yellow background. If the application was running in debug mode it also displays source-code locations in the stack-trace. If the website employed inline server code then it also displays the source code causing the error.
By default, the application's Web.config file tells the server what to do when an unhandled exception occurs, the default is to show a simple error message, as not to reveal any sensitive information about the application's operation to site visitors. The Web.config file can also be used to specify a custom error page or to show the entire error message to all visitors (the default is to only show it to visitors connected to localhost).
White
The White Screen of Death (WSoD) affects some newer mobile phones leaving them with a blank white screen. It was first mentioned in user groups [2] [3] [4] in April 2005. In some cases unplugging the battery and restarting allowed the phone to reboot but some phones are left unusable. Most users found that WSoD was initiated by USB plug removal during mobile phone to computer transfer, and other users reported erratic functioning of the phone after the installation of games, applications and MP3s. WSoD has so far been observed on mobile phones in the USA and Europe. A reflash of firmware can resolve the problem of WSoD but users have reported the same bug on newer phones in the same product line.
On some Pocket PC's there is a WSoD. This occasionally happens and it is usually at random.