Simulating a BlueScreen

I am trying to make a program that records a whole bunch of things periodically. The specific reason is that if it bluescreens, a developer can go back and check a lot of the environment and see what was going on around that time.

My problem, is their a way to cause a bluescreen? Maybe with a windowsAPI call (ZeroMemory maybe?).

Anywhoo, if you can think of a way to cause a bluescreen on call I would be thankful.

The computer I am testing this on is designed to take stuff like this haha.

by the way the language I am using is C\C++. Thank you

You can configure a machine to crash on a keystroke (Ctrl-ScrollLock)

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/244139

Since it appears that there are times when that won't work on some systems with USB keyboards, you can also get the Debugging Tools for Windows, install the kernel debugger, and use the ".crash" command to force a bugcheck.

http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/devtools/debugging/default.mspx

In order to cause a BSOD, a driver running in kernel mode needs to cause it. If you really want to do this, you can write a driver which exposes KeBugCheck to usermode.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms801640.aspx

Thanks to Andrew below for pointing this utility out:

http://download.sysinternals.com/files/NotMyFault.zip

If you kill the csrss process you'll get a blue-screen rather quickly.

If you want to simulate a hard crash such as a bluescreen, you'd pretty much have to yank the power cord. NOT recommended.

In case of a crash, anything not saved to persistent storage will be lost. If you want to simulate a crash for purposes of logging, write a "kill switch" into your logger, which stops the logging. Now you can simulate a crash by killing the logging and making sure you have the data you would have wanted in case of an actual crash.

First of all, I would advise you to use a Virtual Machine to test this BSOD on. This will allow you to keep a backup just in case the BSOD does some damage to the system. Here's a tip on how to generate a BSOD simply by pressing CTRL+SCROLLLOCK+SCROLLLOCK.

Is there a Windows API to generate one? No, according to this article. Still, if you would call certain API's with invalid data, they could still cause a crash inside the kernel, which would result in your BSOD.

I'm not sure exactly what you'd be testing. Since your program runs periodically, surely it's enough to check that the information is being dumped at the frequency that you specify while the system is running? Are you checking that the information stays around after the blue screen? Depending on how you are dumping it (and whether you are flushing buffers), this may not be necessary.

If you dont want to write code (driver, IOCTL...) you can use DiskCryptor. Note that no disk encrypting is need.

Just need to install the driver: