I want a fairly easy way to BSOD a fresh install of Windows 7 or 8 on purpose. Preferably offline, with nothing to undo to get it back up and running again as normal, i.e. a reboot should fix the problem.
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Can you explain why you want this to happen? Causing a BSoD for testing purposes to solve a problem may not yield to the correct results if the BSoD is not giving the message you're after. Or is this for some kind of prank?– LPChipJul 27, 2014 at 19:12
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Primarily prank, or because I feel like doing it, but secondarily to learn.– Filip HaglundJul 27, 2014 at 20:02
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Related: How to mess up a PC running Windows 7?– gronostajJul 27, 2014 at 21:55
6 Answers
The easiest way on Windows that does not require downloads or anything is actually built right into Windows.
- Fire up the Registery Editor
- Navigate to
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\kbdhid\Parameters
- Add a new DWORD value called
CrashOnCtrlScroll
and set it to 1 - Reboot
From then on, the key sequence RCtrl+ScrLk and then ScrLk again will trigger a BSOD. The only downsides is that the crash message on the BSOD states The end user manually generated the crash dump
and some modern laptops don't have a ScrLk and/or RCtrl button.
You can manually revert the registry key to be safe, but as long as you don't touch that key combination again (which is really hard to do by accident) it won't happen again.
- Download Sysinternals Process Explorer
- Run Process Explorer as administrator
- Find
wininit.exe
, right click, and kill it. - 0x000000F4
This works for Windows 7, not sure about Windows 8.
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A few more details about how this works here: superuser.com/questions/729618/… Jan 31, 2016 at 17:35
If you're doing it for research then really a bsod is probably not going to be that useful when you trigger it yourself since it's going to tell you what you already knew (that you killed it.) Occasionally it's useful when programming to capture the exact system state but it's one of those situation where if you were at that level then you'd know what you were doing. :)
As, according to the comments, this is for a prank, the Sysinternals BlueScreen Screen Saver is probably the best tool for the job.
You could over tweak in bios, maybe RAM. This would allow for a easy reboot and get the message "press F1 for default start up settings".
I cannot recall the process name off-hand, but I believe killing csrss.exe (while running taskmgr as admin) will instantly trigger a safe BSOD.