I have a third party application that behaves properly on system restart when a normal shutdown procedure is used. However when the OS crashes for some reason, hardware or software failure the application behaves very poorly on restart and we usually have to do a clean shutdown on the system again, occasionally we have to redeploy the application. Short of turning off the power to the server I would like suggestions on how to force a crash so that I can demonstrate to the vendor the issues and once resolved demonstrate to my client that the corrective actions are effective.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/Q244139 contains exactly the information you need!MCSA/MCTS/MCP

Here's an alternative way. User pskill to terminate csrss.exe http://networkadminkb.com/kb/Knowledge%20Base/Windows2003/Unable%20to%20kill%20the%20CSRSS.exe%20process.aspx

You can also run process explorer as an administrator and kill the smss.exe process, you will get the following crash, # for hex 0xf4 / decimal 244 : CRITICAL_OBJECT_TERMINATION bugcodes.h # A process or thread crucial to system operation has # unexpectedly exited or been terminated. -- Mike Burr

Following steps provided for Windows XP and I just tried in Windows 7, so I think it can work on Windows 2003: 1.Launch the Registry Editor (Regedit.exe). 2.Go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\i8042prt\Parameters. 3.Go to Edit, select New | DWORD Value and name the new value CrashOnCtrlScroll. 4.Double-click the CrashOnCtrlScroll DWORD Value, type 1 in the Value Data textbox, and click OK. 5.Close the Registry Editor and restart Windows XP. 6.When you want to cause a BSOD, press and hold down the [Ctrl] key on the right side of your keyboard, and then tap the [ScrollLock] key twice. Now you should see the BSOD. Shaon Shan| TechNet Subscriber Support in forum| If you have any feedback on our support, please contact tngfb@microsoft.com

wdstarr, As you can see from the responses, there are several ways to do this. There is another tool called "notmyfault.exe" that can simply be run from a command line. The syntax is "notmyfault.exe /crash". You can find more detail about this method and a few others including the keyboard generated crash in the following KB article. How to generate a kernel dump file or a complete memory dump file in Windows Server 2003 http://support.microsoft.com/kb/972110 From the article: Step 5: Generate a manual memory dump by using the NotMyFault tool If you can log on while the problem is occurring, you can use the Microsoft Sysinternals NotMyFault tool. To do this, follow these steps: Visit the following Microsoft Web site to download the NotMyFault tool: http://download.sysinternals.com/Files/Notmyfault.zip (http://download.sysinternals.com/files/notmyfault.zip) Click Start, and then click Command Prompt. At the command line, type NotMyfault.exe /crash, and then press ENTER. Note This operation generates a memory dump file and a D1 stop error.

Where can I find notmyfault.zip. Seems the link http://download.sysinternals.com/files/notmyfault.zip is not valid. Thanks