The 'black screen of death': fact, fiction, or FUD?

Here’s what you need to know about the so-called Black Screen of Death: There’s no such thing.

Yes, yes, I know: The mainstream and tech press published hundreds of stories last week using that term to describe a supposedly new phenomenon affecting Windows PCs. Virtually all of those stories were rehashes of sloppy reporting based on a blog post from a minor security company that later admitted it was wrong and apologized for the story. But as I explain in this post, startup problems are not new to PC hardware and operating systems, and the phenomenon definitely isn’t limited to the Windows operating system.

Editors at tech sites love to write “Black screen of death,” because it echoes the well-known “Blue Screen of Death,” or BSOD—a dreaded event in any Windows user’s workday, to be sure. But it’s not a fair comparison: that distinctive blue screen is not a bug, it’s a feature, more properly known as a STOP error. STOP errors allow Windows to respond to a catastrophic hardware or software failure that prevents the system from continuing to operate. A STOP error captures diagnostic information about the source of the failure and displays it as white text on a blue background. If you see a BSOD, there are debugging tools and well-documented troubleshooting techniques you can use to resolve it.

By contrast, when your PC or Mac torments you with a black screen (or, more accurately, a blank screen), all you know for sure is that the startup process failed at some point. Unlike with a BSOD, there’s no crash file to analyze, no tools you can use to figure out the root cause. The first step in the troubleshooting process involves figuring out where the problem lies, which can be anywhere in the chain of events that begins when you push the power button. It might be a bad system configuration, faulty hardware, defective third-party software, a buggy driver, a race condition or hang in a system service, corruption in the file system or registry, or malware.

So what does it mean if you start your PC or Mac and end up staring at a blank screen instead of seeing your familiar user environment? If you’re using Windows Vista or Windows 7, there are some known causes that I’ll list later in this post. But first, I want to dispel the myth that this sort of trouble is widespread, new, or unique to Windows.

Next page: Black screens on Windows, OS X, and Linux –>