Author: Thom Holwerda
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Blue screens of death are not exactly in short supply on Windows machines lately, but what if you really want to cause your own kernel panic or complete system crash, just because you love that shade of crashy blue? Well, there’s a tool for that called NotMyFault, developed by Mark Russinovich as part of Sysinternals. NotMyFault is a tool that you can use to crash, hang, and cause kernel memory leaks on your Windows system. It’s useful for learning how to identify and diagnose device driver and hardware problems, and you can also use it to generate blue screen dump files on misbehaving systems. The download file includes 32-bit and 64-bit versions, as well as a command-line version that works on Nano Server. Chapter 7 in Windows Internals uses NotMyFault to demonstrate pool leak troubleshooting and Chapter 14 uses it for crash analysis examples. ↫ Mark Russinovich Using this tool, you can select exactly what kind of crash you want to cause, and after clicking the Crash button, your Windows computer will do exactly as it’s told and crash with a lovely blue screen of death. It comes in both a GUI and CLI version, and the latter also works on minimal Windows installations that don’t have the Windows shell installed. A tool like this may seem odd, but it can be particularly useful in situations where you’re trying to troubleshoot an issue, and to learn how to properly diagnose crashes. Or, you know, you can use it to create a panic at your workplace.
