Manually generating crash dump

[Vibz03]

Hi,

I am trying to replicate a problem in test environment. I need to manually crash windows 64 bit server OS for this. I have this OS as Virtual machine inside ESX server.

Any idea on how to create this manual crash? I have tried creating DWORD key in registry but that did not help.

Vibz

[madda]

Unless I am missing something important, this doesn't seem to be a VMware related question.

[Vibz03]

well....i can generate manual crash dump on windows physical system but can not generate on virtual system. So , i thought there might be a setting in vmware.

Vibz

[madda]

whatever you do on a physical system is pretty much 99% replicatable on a virtual system, so you should be able to do the same thing in the VM environment

[JonRoderick]

You can generate BSODs on Windows (physical and virtual) using this:

Browse to the registry key: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\i8042prt\Parameters\

Then look for or create a DWord registry value named "CrashOnCtrlScroll" and change its value to a 1. When you want to cause a BSOD, press and hold down the key on the right side of your keyboard, and then tap the key twice. Now you should see the BSOD.

Have to restart for this change to take effect.

Jon

[kinga8]

We have used a sysinternals tool called NotMyFault () to cause a BSOD when we had a problem with Windows VMs becoming unresponsive.

We could not RDP to them or use the console. We were able to copy the 2 required files to the local filesystem and use psexec to kick it off. The system was set to do a full memory dump, which we were able to grab after the reboot.

Arron