Guru Meditation

Guru Meditation is the name of the error that occurred on early versions of the Amiga home computers when they crashed. It is analogous to the black screen of death and the blue screen of death in other operating systems.

Related Topics:
Amiga - Home computer - Crashed - Black screen of death - Blue screen of death - Operating system

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When a Guru Meditation is displayed, the options are to reboot by pressing the left mouse button, or to invoke ROMWack by pressing the right mouse button. (ROMWack is a minimalist debugger built into the operating system which is accessible by connecting a 9600 bit/s terminal to the serial port).

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The alert itself appears as black rectangular box that located in the upper portion of the screen. Its border and text is red when it is a normal Guru Meditation, or green/yellow when it is a Recoverable Alert, another kind of Guru Meditation. The screen goes black, and the power and disk-activity LEDs may blink immediately before the alert appears. In AmigaOS 1.x, programmed in ROMs known as Kickstart 1.1, 1.2 and 1.3, the errors are always red. In AmigaOS 2.x and 3.x, recoverable alerts are yellow, except for some very early versions of 2.x where they were green. Dead-end alerts are red in all OS versions.

Related Topics:
Recoverable Alert - LED - AmigaOS - ROM

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This error is sometimes referred to colloquially as a "trip to India" or just "alert".

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The alert occurred when there was a fatal problem with the system. If the system had no means of recovery, it could display the alert, even in systems with numerous critical flaws. In extreme cases, the alert could even be displayed if the system's memory was completely exhausted.

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The error is displayed as two fields, separated by a period.

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The first field is either the Motorola 68000 exception number that occurred or an internal error identifier

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(such as an 'Out of Memory' code). The second can be the address of a Task structure, a special error code, or a meaningless value. It is never the address of the code that caused the error.

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The text of the alert messages was completely baffling to most users. Only highly technically-adept Amiga users would know, for example, that exception 3 was an address error, and meant the user was accessing a word on an unaligned boundary. Users without this specialized knowledge would have no recourse but to look for a "Guru" or to simply reboot the machine and hope for the best.

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