Terminal screen is black, frozen, or not responding

Modified on Thu, Jun 11 at 11:41 AM

If the terminal screen will not turn on, is completely frozen, or does not respond to touch, follow these steps to perform a hard reboot. Payments cannot be processed until the terminal is responsive again.

Terminal is on but showing Offline?

That is a different problem. Go to Terminal Offline: Relaunch DealerPOS instead. The steps below are for terminals with an unresponsive or black screen.

1
Unplug the power cable from the left side of the terminal.
2
Press and hold the power button on the left side of the terminal.
3
Keep holding until a white icon appears on the screen. This can take 60 seconds or more — do not let go early, and do not plug the cable back in yet.
4
The moment the white icon appears, plug the power cable back in.
5
Release the power button and allow the terminal to boot on its own. DealerPOS will relaunch automatically — allow 2–3 minutes for the full boot.

What the white icon looks like

A small white graphic appears centered on the screen. The timing matters — do not plug the cable in before the icon appears or the reboot will not complete correctly.

6
Return to DealerWorks in your browser and refresh the page. The terminal should now show as Online.

Before sending a new payment

Do not send a new payment request until the terminal session has fully cleared. If a payment was in progress when the terminal went down, check the Transactions list first to confirm whether it shows as Approved, Failed, or still pending — reprocessing without checking is the most common cause of duplicate charges.

What you'll see

The terminal boots up and DealerPOS launches automatically. Once running, the terminal shows Online in DealerWorks after you refresh your browser.

This restart does not affect any transaction data or reporting.

Need more help?

Contact DealerWorks Support with the terminal name or ID (on the sticker at the bottom of the device), what the screen currently shows, and the steps you have already tried.