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Creating BSODs?

mvanhorn asks: "This is not a joke, or a troll, but my company is testing a failover solution for NT and we were wondering about simple reliable ways to intentionally cause a BSOD. Please don't say "just fire up an application..." it will be neither useful, or funny. But really humorous answers that solve the problem are welcome."

14 of 40 comments (clear)

  1. Put in some flaky hardware? by TheGreek · · Score: 2

    Have you tried putting in some flaky hardware? A great way to get NT/Win2k to break would be to put some bad memory in the box.

  2. programs by crovax · · Score: 2

    There should be programs for that.
    try:
    hackers.com
    L0pht.com
    hackers.com has a large archive of programs.
    -----
    If my facts are wrong then tell me. I don't mind.

  3. Goto your local jr college... by mduell · · Score: 2

    and ask the C/C++ teacher for some first year students programs. They do all kinds of things, including BSOD. Seriously though, this happened at the jr college i went to. (I was at the time in the 8th grade and i knew more than most the people in the class...)

    Mark Duell

  4. Device drivers are the key. by X · · Score: 3

    NT's BSOD problems lie almost entirely in device drivers these days. My suggestion would be to write some kind of device driver who's sole purpose was to crash the machine. There are lots of ways to do this, but probably the best is to just pass the kernel a bad pointer.

    It used to be pretty easy to crash NT by simply stressing IIS, but I haven't had much luck with that of late. My suspicion is that Active Directory Services is the new IIS (in the sense that it's new, delivers lots of functionality that is relied upon by core components). So probably writing a program that recursively adds itself to ADS is probably pretty effective. ;-)

    --
    sigs are a waste of space
    1. Re:Device drivers are the key. by Bryan+Andersen · · Score: 2

      This was what casme to my mind too. Get one of the "demo" device driver sources for NT, hack it so it starts over writing critical kernel space when it's called. That should do it. You could make it really spiff and have it randomly change data and code.

  5. Re:Recursive Calling by Tester · · Score: 2

    The c:\con\con, which also works with c:\nul\nul, and any other combination of the dos devices will work on NT4, but not in w2k... You will have to call M$ tech support, I'm sure they know hundreds of different ways to gets BSODs...

  6. BSOD on NT4 ( dunno about W2K ) by Lupulack · · Score: 2

    Well, we always used to just start up Task Manager, configure it to minimize to the tray, then kill the explorer.exe process ... Task manager no longer has a tray, BOOM!

    BSOD

    --
    The fact that no one understands you doesn't mean you're an artist.
  7. Re:Recursive Calling by michael.creasy · · Score: 3

    Yes it is fixed and a patch is available on www.windowsupdate.com for 98 and 95.

  8. well, in win2k anyway... by DavidOgg · · Score: 2

    load up an external hp CDRW 7500 (parallel port version)

    load the driver...

    now just TRY to boot without a STOP ERROR!

    (this also works with an internal 9300 w/out updated drivers)

    OR use a Realtek chipset NIC and do a Win2k online update and choose to use MS new online realtek drivers. (this works on 50% of the machines)

    OR (heh) convert your NTFS directory (in win2k) to HPFS, it SEEMS to support it for a while, and then "decides" not to support it. (did MS really take HPFS support out, or just make it not work?)

    Use old reference drivers for windows 98 to install video cards in win2k. works like a charm. if working means stop errors anyway.

    Use Fast page and EDO simms mixed together.

    or a variation on this, use an old BIOS and an ODD number of simms, or a version of the bios that lets you force the bios into thinking it has more ram than it does.

    Use a Western digital mastered to a Seagate Slave drive (if it will boot, HDD errors will happen fo no good reason) This is neither WD's fault nor Seagates...They both use funny ways of determining master/slave

    Load Office 95, then load Norton Windoctor and let it "fix" the registry.

    I like this one, put your swap file on a zip drive, but dont use Iomega 2000 tools to install the zip, now eject the zip. Be sure the BIOS sees the zip as a 100Mb Hard drive, not a ARMD device.

    Install win2k with ACPI support, using a bios that SUPPORTS it, then flash the version that came out before w2k, that doesnt fully support ACPI.

    Dont know of any NT specific crashes other than con/con or nul/nul, but it was muck easier to crash NT, win2k seems pretty stable, as far as messing around with it, win2k is much more forgiving than NT was.

    --
    Fear the government that fears your guns. Fear the government that fears your computers. Remove them from my email.
  9. SysInternals has your answer by Chelloveck · · Score: 4

    SysInternals has a solution for this. One of its products is called BlueSave, which is a utility that will save the text of the BSOD to a file. BlueSave is conveniently packaged along with a companion utility that will cause your PC to crash to the BSOD.

    We've provided the source and executable to a program, BSOD, that you can use to intentionally crash your computer in order to test BlueSave. Note that this program uses a device driver component to perform privileged operations and is therefore not exploiting a bug in Windows NT.
    --
    Chelloveck
    I give up on debugging. From now on, SIGSEGV is a feature.
  10. Use pre-SP3 by technos · · Score: 2

    If you can use a pre-SP3 NT box, any of the malformed packet attacks will do it for you. (Teardrop, etc) While the machine won't necessarily blue screen, it will become invisible and unresponsive to the network with a variety of attacks..

    --
    .sig: Now legally binding!
  11. Re:Getadmin by technos · · Score: 2

    SP5 and 6 BSOD, but not reliably..

    SP4, which contained the initial fix for getadmin,
    is still vunerable to it!

    --
    .sig: Now legally binding!
  12. Re:QBASIC by TummyX · · Score: 2

    Duh So what? That's not useful at all. GPF is an application error.

  13. hard freeze by griffjon · · Score: 2

    not a true BSOD, but a crash that requires a manual power-cycle, worked like a charm on my box, every time, dunno if it's replicatable.

    Have a shortcut on your desktop to a folder on a network drive, rightclick-explore, wait 5 seconds,l try and do anything.

    I was running NT4 SP5 with tons of random things. Try and do it without the server service running.

    --
    Returned Peace Corps IT Volunteer