Almost everyone that has ever used Windows has either heard of or experienced a bugcheck - the infamous "Blue Screen of Death." A system may bugcheck for different reasons, but the bottom line is that the operating system has experienced a catastrophic fault that prevents the system from continuing to run. We're going to cover some basic information about why a server may crash, explain how to configure and capture crash dumps and review some basic debugging of a crash dump.
Before we get started however, remember that there is a difference between a bugcheck and an application crash. A bugcheck is a kernel-mode crash, whereas an application crash is a user-mode event. We covered the differences between kernel- and user-mode memory in our Memory Management 101 post several months ago. So what are some common reasons why you may experience a bugcheck?