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As a lot of us encounter freezes or crashes, I am wondering how do I manually initiate a computer to freeze in order to create a memory dump to view and diagnose any issues that may be involved with the crash?
I am looking on how to force the computer to crash instead of waiting for the computer to do it itself.
Your question is slightly unclear -- do you want to make it generate the dump when it crashes, or do you want to generate a dump when it isn't crashing and try to diagnose it from that? If the latter, that's probably not a particularly good way of going about it.
You can enable crash dumps by going to
My Computer > Properties > Startup and Recovery > Settings
and then select either a minidump or a kernel memory dump under Write debugging information. This should write a minidump when a crash is caught.
Required set-up
If you're asking how to crash manually and get a minidump written, you can do the following:
Open regedit.
Locate the following key if you have a USB keyboard:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\kbdhid\Parameters
Or the following key if you have a PS/2 keyboard:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\i8042prt\Parameters
In the Edit menu, click Add Value and add the following registry entry:
CrashOnCtrlScrollREG_DWORD1Exit the registry editor, then reboot.
Crashing the (hung) system
After the reboot, you can trigger a crash by pressing the SCROLL keyboard key twice while you hold the right CTRL key, as long as you have Windows set to write a dump when doing this, it will write it to %SYSTEMROOT%\Minidump.
The hotkey in short form is CTRL+SCR LK+SCR LK.
I would use ProcDump to create a dump of the proccess that is crashed:
ProcDump is a command-line utility whose primary purpose is monitoring an application for CPU spikes and generating crash dumps during a spike that an administrator or developer can use to determine the cause of the spike. ProcDump also includes hung window monitoring (using the same definition of a window hang that Windows and Task Manager use), unhandled exception monitoring and can generate dumps based on the values of system performance counters. It also can serve as a general process dump utility that you can embed in other scripts.
You need to tell the computer to make a crash dump when it blue screens in
My Computer -> Properties -> Advanced -> Start and Recovery.
I use these procedures to analyze the dump.