make a windows 7 machine crash on BSOD

Question

I'm trying to write a windows debug utility and I would need to automatically crash a Windows machine and make a Blue Screen Of Death appear.

I can obviously kill the csrss.exe process from the task manager, but the command TASKKILL /F /IM csrss.exe in a .bat file doesn't work.

Is there another way to make a Windows machine crash on bsod? Maybe some external library able to kill any process.

I would prefer to use a command line approach since I'm more familiar with it.

Solution 1

You can do this in powershell with:

get-process | stop-process -force

Solution 2

In order to force a blue screen, you'll need to install a driver designed to do it. User-mode code isn't supposed to be able to trigger a bugcheck, just kernel code. For an example check out Mark Russinovich's notmyfault.sys: http://blogs.technet.com/b/markrussinovich/archive/2005/08/17/unkillable-processes.aspx

Comments

[Rich]

It cannot. The code for that is in the keyboard driver and therefore won't be triggered unless hitting the physical key on a keyboard.

[Roland Pihlakas]

This function is available to drivers.

[Roman Starkov]

A driver is not required. NtRaiseHardError, an undocumented (but well-known) function, can trigger a BSOD from user mode.