Xbox One Green Screen Of Death - What Causes It And How We Can Fix It

What is the Green Screen Of Death fault?

If your Xbox gets stuck on the green load up screen or the green load up screen goes to a black screen then your Xbox one is suffering from what is becoming commonly known as the Green Screen Of Death. The same fault may be shown in other ways too. Here is a list of symptoms that require the same repair process:

• Xbox One hangs on the green load up screen.
• The Xbox One shows the green load up screen then goes to a black screen.
• Xbox One doesn't even turn on
• Error codes shown on the green load up screen

So if you are having any of these problems you may be asking yourself why has this happened and what can you do to fix it? Read on to find out more. 

What causes the Green Screen Of Death

No one has formally confirmed what causes these faults to happen but from the vast amount of enquiries we receive, and the repair we have to do to cure the fault we have a pretty good idea. Each time you start up an Xbox One it communicates with Microsoft's servers to see if there are any updates to apply. Sometimes it will also do a security sweep of your HDD to make sure there aren't any suspicious files on there. If there is an update it will be downloaded and installed as the system starts up. If this fails you can get one of the symptoms detailed above. 

Sometimes there could be a read write error to the HDD due to the HDD being corrupt. This could be from something as simple as saving a game or an update going wrong. Another cause can be a communication error between the servers and the Xbox which causes a software corruption. 

If you use the Instant On option, the console is able to perform system updates while it is in standby mode. If power is lost to the console whilst it is in these modes, particularly if it is doing an update, it could cause corruption issues

How to fix the Xbox One Green Screen Of Death

Before you send in the Xbox for repair there are a few things you can try to bring it back to life yourself. The Xbox forums have some advice but to give you a summary here are a couple of steps

1. Clear the cache of the Xbox One by holding power button of for 10 seconds and seeing if it boots to the dashboard
2. Perform an offline update using a USB stick as detailed here on the Xbox Support Page

If this fails the Xbox may need more technical support. You can send it in to a professional repair centre like ourselves. The first thing we would do is turn on the console to confirm the fault. If it is suffering from the same symptoms as detailed above we will dismantle the console and remove the hard drive. We then analyse the SMART data on the hard drive to see if there are any read write issues or bad sectors on the hard drive. From this we are able to see if we can repair the software on the drive or if the drive needs a complete replacement. 

This is where the repair gets even more technical. The Xbox One hard drives cannot be accessed by a Windows PC (ironically). The Xbox One hard drives are also paired to the motherboard of the console so are not hot swappable. As well as these factors the hard drives are configured completely differently to any standard setup so are certainly not plug and play.

We have the expertise here that not many other people do. We are able to set up and configure a new HDD that will work in your console. We test it through Microsoft's updates and they work perfectly. We were one of the first to offer this repair.  

To Summarise

• This fault is to do with the hard drive
• Try the tips on the Xbox website first
• If you don't have any success send to a reputable repair centre like us :) (click the product link below to go to our repair page)
• Sometimes only the software needs reconfiguration
• Other times the HDD needs a complete replacement (at an extra cost - around 20% of the time)

If you need any further advice please leave a message below and feel free to share this post. It may help someone.