During the booting process, the Motorola VIP displays a number of coloured dots on the screen. These may be used for error handling.
Five dots are available, and each of these may either be dark grey, steady red, blinking yellow or steady green. The dark grey colour is used to represent an inactive state.
| Dot | State | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Red | No Ethernet link. The etherboot is unable to establish a link, usually due to unplugged Ethernet cable or hardware problems |
| Static Yellow | Retrieving DHCP from server. | |
| Blinking Yellow | Joining the Metadata multicast channel. | |
| Blinking Green | Ten small dots indicate software download progress. Will become static once download is done. | |
| Static Green | If no ethernet link is avaliable, but software is avaliable in flash first dot will become static green with no progress bar (not available on models without large flash). | |
| 2 | Blinking Yellow | Save software to flash memory. Ten small dots indicate progress. OR if first dot became imediately green, read software from flash instead. |
| Green | Files saved successfully. OR on models without large flash it will become green imediately. | |
| 3 | Red | Could not start the operating system using any available boot possibility. |
| Blinking Yellow | Verifying signature and unpacks the software. | |
| Static Yellow | Starting Motorola HAL system. | |
| Static Green | Motorola HAL started successfully. | |
| 4 | Red | Platform failed to start. |
| Blinking Yellow | Starting platform. | |
| Green | Platform successfully started. | |
| 5 | Red | Applications failed to start. |
| Blinking Yellow | Applications starting. | |
| Green | Applications started successfully. |