My computer is hard hung, now what can I do?
You may run into instances where a machine becomes "hard hung", I usually can tell when a machine is in this state because the "num lock" and "caps lock" key don't work. So what can you do in these instances? Well Windows has the ability to create a manual crash dump. Manual crash dumps will always have the bugcheck code of 0xE2. If you check out this article, you'll find all the info about this technique but I'm just going to give you the meat of it.
1.
Start Registry Editor.
2.
Locate the following registry subkey:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\i8042prt\Parameters
3.
On the Edit menu, click Add Value, and then add the following registry entry:
Name: CrashOnCtrlScroll
Data Type: REG_DWORD
Value: 1
Now when you hit CTRL+SCROLL LOCK+SCROLL LOCK, it will cause your machine to bugcheck, if this does not make your machine bugcheck, then you either have a typo in the registry key, or more than likely this is a hardware issue and you should check your driver/BIOS versions and make sure everything is up to date.
We see a lot of manual crash dumps internally here at MSFT and most of the time its due to some driver that has a bug in it and not Windows OS code. At this point you have a dmp file that you can either send to MSFT for analysis, or dig into yourself. To find out more about analyzing a hung system you can use !analyze -hang, !vm, !locks, etc. Check out the debugger chm file for other techniques. If you don't know how to view dmp files check out my first post.
Technorati tags: BSOD, DMP, Bugcheck, Bugcode, Windows, Active Directory