Enabling Crash Dumps on the Target System

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[oR]

As presented in Chapter 17, crash dumps that occur after a driver failure can be very helpful in isolating and locating bugs. To enable this feature on a target machine, the following steps are required:

1. From the Control Panel, select the System applet.

2. Select the Advanced tab.

3. Choose the Startup and Recovery button.

4. Select either Complete Memory Dump or Kernel Memory Dump from the Write Debugging Information group. It is prudent to also select Overwrite any existing file.

5. Note (or change) the location and filename of the crash dump file. By default, it is %SystemRoot%\MEMORY.DMP.

6. Select OK.

7. Reboot the system, as the changes made to this reconfiguration take effect only with the next boot.

When a crash occurs, the system copies an image of physical memory into the paging file of the root partition. During the next boot, the image is copied into the file specified with Control Panel.

Forcing a Memory Dump With a Keystroke Sequence

By modifying a registry entry, Windows 2000 allows the user to generate a keystroke sequence, Ctrl-Scroll Lock (twice), to force a system Stop with the message:

 *** STOP: 0x000000E2 (0x00000000,0x00000000,0x00000000, 0x00000000) The end-user manually generated the crashdump. 

The Registry entry is located in the key:

 HKLM\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\i8042prt\Parameters 

By adding the value with the name, type, and data shown below, the feature is enabled. For obvious reasons, it is not enabled by default.

Table

Value Name:	CrashOnCtrlScroll
Data Type:	REG_DWORD
Value:	1

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