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."

Comments

Device drivers are the key.

[X]

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. ;-)

Re:Recursive Calling

[michael.creasy]

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

SysInternals has your answer

[Chelloveck]

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.