Red screen of death

DCW1000

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Jan 12, 2015
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I had an ugly experience today. After two days of trying to find a way to delete and reinstall a malfunctioning Outlook on my 950XL, I figured I would just do a hard reset. That approach has worked previously to bring badly performing apps back into compliance. I had already used the WDRT three days ago to update the firmware, so I just pushed the "reset" button in the phone's settings panel.

Halfway through, abort -- the phone reported that it couldn't reset. That's when I connected it to the WDRT again. The phone was recognized as a 950XL and the downloads began. Suddenly there was a failure notification and a "Try again" message. So I started WDRT again and reconnected, but this time it didn't know what type of phone it was trying to recover. I clicked the "not recognized" button and then the Lumia option on the next screen. A download progress bar got to about halfway across the screen before I got the "Failure" message again. Retried and got a third of the way across. Retried and got the failure before any of the download progress bar was filled in. At this point the screen displayed something I had never seen before -- a brick red background with two broken arrows at the top of the screen forming a square with open corners. Powering the phone down would black the screen after about 10 seconds, and then a split second later the phone had a start buzz, recreating the brick screen. The only way to turn it off completely was to open it and pull the battery.

So off to the Microsoft Store I went, where the tech tried the WDRT solution again and saw the red screen. Then he tried to restart the phone for another go and -- nothing. Not just a stuck phone with a brick-colored screen but a totally nonresponsive powerless brick with no display and no vibration cues at all. At that point he said, "We'll give you a new one."

So I came home with a new 950XL and spent the next four hours getting it configured, updated and reloaded with all my apps and photos. After seeing that the previously problematic Outlook was working properly, I enrolled the new phone in the Insider program and upgraded to 14393.5. In the course of this long process I got the OTA firmware update that is now rolling out in North America and other lands, which was nice. No need to connect to WDRT to get a fully up-to-date working phone. The phone came to me with OS 10586.107 on it and a build date of February. It updated first to 10586.494, and then later I took it up to the current Fast Ring release.

At the end of the day I am no worse off than I was a couple of days ago, ignoring the frustration and lost time. Microsoft was fine to work with and decided quickly to replace a clearly troubled phone rather than to take it in and try to do something serious with it in the back room.

I'm sorry I didn't use another phone to catch an image of the red screen. I kept thinking the phone was going to come back from the dead right up to the instant when it just flat out died on the Microsoft counter.

Long story, but I had never seen a red screen before and wanted to mention it as a sign of serious trouble if any others come across it.
 
Good thing that you got a replacement - perhaps you could stay on official build until next week?
 
I believe that when WDRT is transferring date to the phone it shows progress both on the PC screen but also on the phone -- which has a red background -- at least that's what I saw with my last WDRT update. It sounds like your old phone got in some type of mode where the transfer just hung.
 
I believe that when WDRT is transferring date to the phone it shows progress both on the PC screen but also on the phone -- which has a red background -- at least that's what I saw with my last WDRT update. It sounds like your old phone got in some type of mode where the transfer just hung.

I wasn't aware of the red screen when I used WDRT on earlier occasions. I only noticed it on the phone this time after I had a failure message on the screen of the machine running WDRT, so I may well not have noticed that the red screen is an expected feature of the process rather than a horrible outcome. If I ever have to use WDRT again for the new phone or another one, I'll keep a closer eye on the phone and not just watch the PC screen. Thanks for the insight.
 
I wasn't aware of the red screen when I used WDRT on earlier occasions. I only noticed it on the phone this time after I had a failure message on the screen of the machine running WDRT, so I may well not have noticed that the red screen is an expected feature of the process rather than a horrible outcome. If I ever have to use WDRT again for the new phone or another one, I'll keep a closer eye on the phone and not just watch the PC screen. Thanks for the insight.

You're welcome. I was intrigued by the fact that the progress indicator on the PC and the phone itself moved identically, but then I realized that's what I would expect once I realized what was happening. Microsoft should have used a different color than red though -- it alarmed me at first.
 
I concur that the brick red is the WDRT transferring data. It's a bit freaky when you haven't seen it before! I had to change my underwear when I saw it, that was after that tight knot in the pit of your stomach!!
 

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