Character-Mode Messages

Two types of character-mode messages occur when the Windows NT Kernel detects an inconsistent condition from which it cannot recover: STOP messages and hardware-malfunction messages. You can organize these messages into the following groups:

• STOP messages that could happen only during the relatively short Windows NT startup period, which is Phase 4 of the Windows NT boot sequence
• STOP messages that can be traced back to a software condition detected by the processor
• Hardware-malfunction messages that can be traced back to a hardware condition detected by the processor
• All the rest of the STOP messages