In case of OS/2, a Black Screen of Death either manifests itself into a “TRAP screen” or a “hard error”, switching the display to text mode. The screen displays white letters on a black background, using the text mode font of the display adapter.

TRAP screens

When malfunctioning hardware or a software issue causes the kernel to encounter an error from which it cannot recover, the system crashes, throwing out a “TRAP screen”. Faulty device drivers can also cause a “TRAP screen”.
The “TRAP screen” holds critical information regarding the version of the operating system. It also holds the actual processor exception that was triggered and a dump of the processor registers and stack.
As the “TRAP screen” occurs the user is left with the options of performing a soft boot by pressing Control-Alt-Delete, or performing a system dump by pressing the same twice.

Hard error screens

When a “hard” error takes place, a pop-up is thrown out. This pop-up screen holds information regarding the processor exception that was triggered. You may choose to proceed with one of the following:

• End the process that is causing the error,
• Ask for more information about it,
• Retry, or
• Ignore the error and continue