Fatal error

(computer science) An error in a computer program which causes running of the program to be terminated.

A condition that halts processing due to faulty hardware, program bugs, read errors or other anomalies. If you get a fatal error, you generally cannot recover from it, because the operating system has encountered a condition it cannot resolve. Typically, buggy applications cause fatal errors (fatal exception errors), and the computer locks up. In most cases, all data that you have changed that has not yet been saved to disk is lost.

There is no rule of thumb with fatal errors. You may never get one again, or it may manifest until you fix the problem. If you get a fatal error after just adding a new peripheral or installing a new software package, remove or uninstall it and try again.

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See also Fatal Error (film)

In computing, a fatal error is an error which causes a program to abort - and thus may return the user to the operating system. When this happens, data that the program was processing may be lost. A fatal error occurs typically in any of these cases:

• An illegal instruction has been attempted
• Invalid data or code has been accessed
• The privilege level of an operation is invalid
• A program attempts to divide by zero. (Only for integers; with the IEEE floating point standard, this creates an infinity instead)

In some systems, such as Microsoft Windows, a fatal error causes the operating system to create a log entry or to save an image (core dump) of the process.

See also

v • d • e Screens of death Colors Black · Blue · Red · White Other screens Kernel panic · Sad Mac · Bomb · Red Ring of Death · Row of bombs · Guru Meditation · Kill screen

External links

• What Are Fatal Exception Errors - Microsoft Knowledge Base

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