Does a manually initiated crash (bugcheck 0xDEADDEAD) trigger a disk-check?

2

Windows has an advanced function built-in that lets a user manually initiate a BSOD. It is a debugging tool used to halt the system in the event of (though not necessarily limited to) a hang or freeze.

When used, it causes a BSOD with the string MANUALLY_INITIATED_CRASH1 and whimsical code 0xDEADDEAD.

The point to this crash is that it is purposely done by the user, so it is not (or at least should not) be an unpredictable event caused by hardware errors or bad drivers (at least not necessarily bad drivers).

The question then is whether performing a manual crash properly flushes the disk caches and such so that the drive is in a valid state when rebooting and thus forgoing the need to have chkdsk run.

windows
bsod
chkdsk
asked on Super User Dec 13, 2012 by Synetech • edited Dec 17, 2012 by Synetech

2 Answers

2

Not having access to the Windows sources, I cannot give a definitive, technical answer, however I can report my test results.

After performing a manual crash a few times, under different circumstances (at least as different as I can create), I have found that a manual BSOD seems to behave much like a regular BSOD. That is, it usually causes chkdsk to run on the next boot (though perhaps not surprisingly, I have yet to see any actual errors found during the scan), however occasionally, it does not (just like how some real BSODs occasionally do not cause chkdsk to run).

It looks like whether or not chkdsk runs is dependent on the disk usage prior to the crash regardless of the cause of the BSOD and that a manual one is not special in any way.

(It is odd since it could easily have been designed to at least attempt a quick flush first; the worst that could happen is that it fails. Of course it is probably due to due the nature of the underlying architecture and how the function is performed.)

answered on Super User Dec 13, 2012 by Synetech
0

I'd imagine so. NTFS is a journaled file system and if the system is stopped abruptly by a BSOD then pending journal entries will need to be brought up into the main filesystem. A (manual) BSOD during a disk write could also have implications on the structure of the filesystem, so it'd seem prudent to check it.

answered on Super User Dec 13, 2012 by PhonicUK

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