# The most frightening BSOD



## Torin_Darkflight (Sep 30, 2007)

Thoughts from a computer geek...

Any BSOD is already frightening by itself. However, it is my opinion, both as a computer geek and as a PC technician...that Windows NT 4.0 has the absolute most frightening BSOD possible.

Why do I think so? Well, let's briefly sum up the various iterations of the BSOD for comparison, and you'll see why.

Windows 9x had the famous "A fatal exception has occurred", which was only about four or five lines worth of text. Aside from the occasional smattering of hex code, it wasn't overly technical, although it did occur often enough to become a major annoyance. On the very unlikely chance that anyone reading this has never seen a Win9x BSOD, this is what it looks like:







Windows 2000...at the absolute worst, a Win2K BSOD takes up only the top 1/3 of the screen. But, it was a little more frightening than a Win9x BSOD, because the very first word on it, in big capital letters, was "STOP". The big screaming STOP is then immediately followed by a bunch of seemingly random hex code, then another line of seeming gibberish in all capital letters with underscores instead of spaces, something along the lines of "KMODE_EXCEPTION_NOT_HANDLED". A little more technical, a little more scary, but still fairly tolerable, especially since they were very rare (Win2K was beautifully stable on well-maintained and sufficiently-compatible systems). A typical Win2K BSOD looks like this:






Windows XP and Vista actually speak in a somewhat friendly manner to you during a BSOD. They actually stop for a moment to say "Ok, sorry about that, but a problem happened, I have to shut down now. Here's some ways to try to fix the problem". Yeah that's not the exact wording, but it gets the point across. A WinXP BSOD takes up nearly the entire screen, but easily 90% of that space is the friendly "explaining what happened and what can be done to fix it in English" text. Only the last few lines have the scary techie text, which often is similar to the first few lines of a Win2K BSOD. "STOP" in all capital letters, followed by hex code. Sometimes the WEIRD_NAME_FOR_THE_PROBLEM_THAT_HAPPENED line appears, sometimes it doesn't (When it does, it's often towards the top of the screen mixed in with the friendly text). Here's a typical WinXP/Vista BSOD:






That leaves Windows NT 4.0...the subject of this discussion. The BSOD for Windows NT 4.0...is the most frightening of all. A WinNT4 BSOD takes up the entire screen. A vast majority of it is hex code. Imagine 95% of the screen covered in hex code and other computer gibberish, with very little readable English. A typical Windows NT 4.0 BSOD...looks something like this...






*shudders*


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## Bokracroc (Sep 30, 2007)

The Rainbow Spinner of Death on Mac is pretty scary.


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## Tomtenizze (Sep 30, 2007)

Wow... That's one scary BSOD.


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## net-cat (Sep 30, 2007)

For a tech, anyway, it's more useful than Win9x's BSOD.

I have a pretty good idea of what's going on in each of those samples, except for the Win9x one.

(And it's usually better than "kernel panic!" in whatever free Unix you care to use...)


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## HaTcH (Sep 30, 2007)

Hehe... THough, windows is not the only operating system to give scary BSODs!

(I'm aware these aren't blue )

How bout a SunOS boot panic! 





Don't have a picture of a kernel panic, but its equally freaky!

Lets see.. My TV did this once.. reminded me of the matrix....





I have to say, the Windows XP Stop codes are irritating on some computers once in a while, as you know they occur, but they only flash briefly! My best friend's PC was doing this, he had to get a camera and take a picture of it.


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## net-cat (Sep 30, 2007)

I hate that. It's possible to disable that "feature." But they did that to create the illusion that XP doesn't get as many blue screens as previous NT-based operating systems.

Here's what MacOS X looks like when it kernel panics. (That's from a beige G3, but it's not in the picture. The text is actually scrolling by really fast, and my camera went into slow shutter mode because I had disabled the flash.)


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## CyberFoxx (Sep 30, 2007)

Well, if the BSOD screensaver for xscreensaver is to be believed, OS/2 and OS/390 have some pretty scary crashes. Although, BSD is quite nice:


```
panic: don't
syncing disks: 20 16 10 7 0
sunk!
rebooting
```


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## Eevee (Sep 30, 2007)

Haha, the NT one is an IRQ problem.


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## net-cat (Sep 30, 2007)

Actually, IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL has very little to do with IRQ's.



> This Stop message indicates that a kernel-mode process or driver attempted to access a memory address to which it did not have permission to access.



I've seen two things cause that. Bad driver and bad memory. More often than not, it's the former.


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## DavidN (Sep 30, 2007)

The thing that I was most scared of goes back a bit further than Win9x - it was DOS4GW's error reporting technique. It was similar to the NT4 one that you showed, but it didn't even bother clearing the screen and arranging it nicely - instead, you'd get a shocking stream of text splattered over whatever you were doing and find yourself back at the DOS prompt in the strange and unnatural mode 40 (which I now find inherently frightening because of DOS4GW).


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## Eevee (Sep 30, 2007)

net-cat said:
			
		

> > This Stop message indicates that a kernel-mode process or driver attempted to access a memory address to which it did not have permission to access.
> 
> 
> 
> I've seen two things cause that. Bad driver and bad memory. More often than not, it's the former.


Thanks, Microsoft, for your extremely accurate and informative error codes.


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## Oni (Oct 1, 2007)

DavidN said:
			
		

> The thing that I was most scared of goes back a bit further than Win9x - it was DOS4GW's error reporting technique. It was similar to the NT4 one that you showed, but it didn't even bother clearing the screen and arranging it nicely - instead, you'd get a shocking stream of text splattered over whatever you were doing and find yourself back at the DOS prompt in the strange and unnatural mode 40 (which I now find inherently frightening because of DOS4GW).


I've never heard or seen that happen before, absolutely hilarious. I understand how that could be frightening.


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## CyberFoxx (Oct 1, 2007)

Ah, the DOS4GW error, used to get that all the time with Duke3D. Turns out that one of my 8MB 72-pin SIMMs was going bad. ^_^

BTW, if you want a really messed error, my old 386 Ambra once booted up to a "Processor not found" message. Guess they didn't need the CPU in order for the BIOS to initialize...

Oh, and my Compaq 286 was known to boot into it's ROM BASIC every other boot. Was quite annoying.


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## themocaw (Oct 1, 2007)

I'd actually say the most frightening error message of all was one that told you that not only was your computer dead, but that your house was going to burn down. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Printer_on_fire


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## CyberFoxx (Oct 1, 2007)

Ah yes:

drivers/char/lp.c:                      printk(KERN_INFO "lp%d on firen", minor);

Still, I think this one better:

arch/i386/kernel/cpu/mcheck/p5.c:               printk(KERN_EMERG "CPU#%d: Possible thermal failure (CPU on fire ?).n", smp_processor_id());

Now that's a kernel panic!

Or better yet:

drivers/video/atafb.c:                 /* Nobody will ever see this message  */
                panic("Cannot initialize video hardware");

If you see that message, something is wrong...

The Linux kernel has some of the best error messages. Randomly grep'ng it for words never gets old.


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## themocaw (Oct 1, 2007)

I also remember my mom threatening to call the cops on me for doing illegal things on the computer because of a computer error that read "illegal operation at. . ."  I don't know what she thought I was doing: selling drugs over the internet or something, maybe.


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## webkilla (Oct 4, 2007)

most scary BSOD?

easy - the one where your computer afterwards turns off and wont turn on again...


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## draigfaol (Oct 4, 2007)

That last one says "Your local IT is going to have a migraine now".


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## Ron Overdrive (Oct 4, 2007)

I'd have to say the scariest BSOD's come from videogame consoles because you won't know if it bricked or not until you reboot it. Computers you can at least easily fix. One time my friend was playing Soul Calibur on his DreamCast and he got an Orange Screen of Death which freaked us out and made us laugh at the same time. When I got a BSOD on my PSP when I first downgraded that it got me spooked a bit even though thats part of the old downgrading process.


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## hypr (Oct 6, 2007)

The ones I hate are what happened recently, a STOP Error complaining about some ACPI thing, that error doesn't count, its on the motherboards fault it has ACPI enabled or disabled or something.


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## gliengul (Oct 29, 2007)

Torin_Darkflight said:
			
		

> That leaves Windows NT 4.0...
> *shudders*



What's so scary about installing the wrong SCSI driver?

Getting the Windows Licensing BSOD on Vista is infinitely more scary.


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## hypr (Oct 29, 2007)

usually the most frightening BSOD is the one when you least expect it, Windows XP used to give me a BSOD when I was using my tablet after 15 minutes, IRQ_LESS_THAN_EQUAL so I reinstalled. because I thought my HD was dying, but figured out IDE 1 and possibly 2 are at fault so I have to use a RAID Card.

None the less I really like the Illegal Operation errors because of the fact that everyone thinks someone has done something illegal on the internet or something, too bad they aren't really common anymore...


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## Zestence (Oct 30, 2007)

windows 98 really knows the art of BSOD. I was stuck with that crappy OS for years and it never gave ANY warning...just strange "click" sounds when monitor changed resolution and there it was...the "memory 0E" error or something BSOD...and i could have smashed my keyboard forever but it would not go away...."press any key to continue..."....continue where, to the next blue screen?


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## Bokracroc (Oct 30, 2007)

Kattiz said:
			
		

> windows 98 really knows the art of BSOD. I was stuck with that crappy OS for years and it never gave ANY warning...*just strange "click" sounds when monitor changed resolution* and there it was...the "memory 0E" error or something BSOD...and i could have smashed my keyboard forever but it would not go away...."press any key to continue..."....continue where, to the next blue screen?



Haha, good ol' fishbowls.
A few of the old fishbowls at school make a loud fizzling noise these days. Only one has burnt out so far.


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## Haystack (Nov 25, 2007)

The worst BSoDs come with the Magic Smoke!


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## Phantomgraph (Nov 28, 2007)

*lol* The BSOD on *nix is black but hey... the best of all time has to be the one when I was doing some beta testing for a card manufacture on a Linux box. The card was a technical dream/nightmare that ISP would use to turn a x86 box into what's known as a NAS (Network access server, the thing that answers the phone when you dial in with your modem)

I was one of two guys who did the beta testing for the drivers on Linux. (Red hat, forget the version but five or six I think) Of course to install the driver you had to compile it into the kernel (Anyone who's done this knows what a pain in the bum it can be. Now the guy that wrote the drivers was from India and so was the other beta tester so we barely could understand one another. 

When I finally got a kernel to compile (after weeks of mucking with it) I would get a lovely message on boot up. A bunch of hex code and a message that  started like "Oh s*it the f*cking tspan timer won't sync to the clock. Modem models ain't going to work d*ckhead." without the *'s of course. Yes, it swore!

First time I saw that I was ROTFL literaly (Of course it was 3 am and I was tired so that helped.) 

Now it took the software guy like three weeks to understand that the message should be toned down a wee bit. Turns out some American engineer wrote this on the specs for the error code message and the programmer just typed it in, not understanding enough English to know better.

In the end we did use the board and got the thing to work (I ended up helping fix the drivers and making them in to a kernel module that could be loaded and unloaded with modprobe.) I also fixed the wording, but I snuck in something of an easter egg... It would say "Module cored.. exiting error (some number) unable to sync the tspan. Please check the telco network interface and modprobe again." (The last part of which sounds conspiciously like "Please check the number and dial again.")

I'm fairly certain that that code is still in the drivers (if the thing is even being made anymore).


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## Tachyon (Nov 30, 2007)

I like the idea of a new unix user experiencing their first kernel panic and running screaming out of their house.


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## amtrack88 (Dec 20, 2007)

The BSOD is actually pretty useful once you can decipher the error message or hex.


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## Zero_Point (Dec 20, 2007)

Tachyon said:
			
		

> I like the idea of a new unix user experiencing their first kernel panic and running screaming out of their house.



I actually got a kernel panic just STARTING a Kubuntu installation. < ___ >


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## Ceceil Felias (Dec 22, 2007)

The only time I've experienced a Kernel panic so far was back in high school when an OSX update failed on a classroom eMac. Being the only semi-experienced person with computers there, I looked up some startup key combinations and forced it into verbose mode, only to find out that it barely even got into the boot process (the specific panic was that init died). It kinda amused me that "We're hanging in here..." was snuck into Darwin's code, though.  In comparison, I've only had a few minor issues with X on my server box so far (and a BSOD when it came to Windows Server 2003, but it was due to an old BIOS and the 2003 install isn't going to be sticking around anyway ;P).

Also, I don't see what's so scary about the NT4 BSOD. D: But maybe it's just me. What IS a scary BSOD is... Hm. I'll have to give this one some thought. D:


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## uncia (Dec 22, 2007)

webkilla said:
			
		

> most scary BSOD?
> 
> easy - the one where your computer afterwards turns off and wont turn on again...


Not technically a BSOD, but they don't make 'em like they used to. Thankfully...
POKE 59458,62 on early Commodore PET 8032s would cause the video circuitry to go haywire after a few lines printed on the screen, then melt down (literally).
Some older software had that command included, since it was previously a way in which to force text to be displayed more quickly, so testing could be an "interesting" experience if you couldn't be bothered searching the code first.


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## Janglur (Dec 22, 2007)

I'll say it again:


Win3.11/9x:

"The process cannot be completed because the process completed successfully."
That is the single worst error you can see.  It means you're REALLY fubar'd.


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## Pi (Feb 19, 2008)

IRQL should really be called IPL (interrupt priority level). That said, none of those are really scary so much as the NT4 is visually busy.

"Scary" is the macintosh Bomb, which was rumored to make neophytes assume their computer was going to explode.


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## net-cat (Feb 19, 2008)

Heh. I remember in my highschool, we had a lot of NuBus based Macs. I forget which model specifically (I want to say Power Mac 6100/something,) but if you hit certain keys during boot up, it would actually play a recording of tires screeching and a crash, followed by the infamous "Sad Mac" bitmap.

Also, since this was highschool, people thought it was great fun to come up to random people's computers and hit "Apple-Power," which would bring up that damned debug prompt. (You know, the black and white box with ">".) Didn't take me long to figure out "G FINDER"...


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## Pi (Feb 20, 2008)

net-cat said:
			
		

> Heh. I remember in my highschool, we had a lot of NuBus based Macs. I forget which model specifically (I want to say Power Mac 6100/something,) but if you hit certain keys during boot up, it would actually play a recording of tires screeching and a crash, followed by the infamous "Sad Mac" bitmap.
> 
> Also, since this was highschool, people thought it was great fun to come up to random people's computers and hit "Apple-Power," which would bring up that damned debug prompt. (You know, the black and white box with ">".) Didn't take me long to figure out "G FINDER"...



Apple-Power did both the car-crash, and the minibug.

You probably wanted "G", because "G FINDER" would crash your current app, whereas "G" would continue it.

The only reason "G FINDER" worked to crash the current app in a vaguely safe manner, by the way, is because the expression evaluator interpreted it as an odd number, the effect of jumping to which is a nono on both the 68k (address bus fault) and the ppc (instructions are uniformly sized).


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## net-cat (Feb 20, 2008)

Probably. That was something like 6 or 7 years ago and I avoided using Mac OS like the plague.


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## indrora (Apr 8, 2008)

the scariest BSOD isnt caused by software
NOOOO

the scariest BSOD is when you have a laptop like my old one
nVidia GForce GO 1000 - it always *magically* reported 65*C.
but a probe showed 153*C

the plastic would expand and warp around the connectors to the mobo at arounf 175*C (no i'm not shitting you, its an alienware m7700 with a p4m 3.00 dualie), and would.... die, causing the machine to loose all connection to the GPU. this made any reasonable OS (this discounts ReactOS here) would piss its pants and shit itself naked. and then the screen would just... slowly start to fade and nothing would happen and the CPU would lock and the entire machine was bricked until you froze the fucker

that friends, is the scariest and most frustrating BSOD to deal with. 

my favorite kernel panic was on that same machine too:
/var/log/messages: ( 2:21:54 feb 23 2008 ) Why must i crash, dear world, as i have lost the connection to my X server backend... 

Looks like the nVidia server wanted to rape the Xorg server in an Xorgy.


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## AuroraBorealis (Apr 10, 2008)

By far the most frightening error message.

http://deadmac.ytmnd.com/


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## indrora (Apr 11, 2008)

Pi said:
			
		

> IRQL should really be called IPL (interrupt priority level). That said, none of those are really scary so much as the NT4 is visually busy.
> 
> "Scary" is the macintosh Bomb, which was rumored to make neophytes assume their computer was going to explode.



Thanks to doing some reading (wee reading) the icon was called "deep" and all calls that handled crashes were prepended with "ds" -- now, it was hard to say "loading deep shit manager" on a polite society computer, so it was reffered to as things like "deep sause", "Dark Seven" (0x0fd7 was a special command register i belive for audio -- though that is from ignorance.), and some other notable names. 

The bomb icon was supposed to represent that the system sofware blowed up. _Thank you, susan kare, for scaring the living crap out of thousands of people_


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## AuroraBorealis (Apr 11, 2008)

i still think the chimes of death was even more scary, how they came up with that i dont know.

and also, this is a pretty stupid crash error screen...where you have to count the bombs in order to interpret your error...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Row_of_bombs


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## Valerion (Apr 11, 2008)

I always hated LILO's output, where I often got a LIL- when my LBA parameters on the HDD were incorrect, or I had some remapping software loaded, usually from Seagate, installed on the drive, otherwise DOS couldn't access the drive.  Fun days, those.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LILO#Output


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## Stratelier (Apr 12, 2008)

> I've never heard or seen that happen before, absolutely hilarious. I understand how that could be frightening.


I remember those days.  Before the advent of DOS protected mode, Sierra's old adventure games required virtually all your conventional RAM, and if it ran out while the game was running -- it gave you a short error message to the tune of "Out of Hunk!" (not to be confused with "out of heap") and back to the DOS prompt with ya.

Mode 13 crashes were pretty rare, but I'm sure I experienced one or two.


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## XERO (May 5, 2008)

I think the Linux Kernel Panic is the worst to the non tech-savvy person. To the tech-savvy though, it is one of, if not the best.


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