Finding useful crash-information in Windows 8 Consumer Preview

Solution 1:

You need to set up manual generation of a kernel / complete memory dump, open "On This Page" and click on "How to generate a manual memory dump file by using the keyboard".

The CrashOnCtrlScroll trick might allow you to cause a dump to be generated while the system is hung, similar to how the Magic SysRq works on Linux. You can then use WinDBG from the Debugging Tools for Windows to further investigate the crash dump, which comes with a nice help file with a lot of debugging techniques.

If this doesn't work you'll need to set up kernel-mode debugging using some preferred communication method and then start WinDBG (or Visual Studio but I doubt if it is capable of deep analyis of the problem) with connection parameters or make the connection from the File menu.

If you are new to this, you might want to get some background on how Windows works internally as well as make sure you download the Windows Symbol Packages for your OS as otherwise the stack traces and other information regarding functions you'll see could be meaningless.

Good luck, it can be hard at first but it'll be more valuable the more you learn...

Hard freezes are amongst the hardest cases to debug, as they don't give you a point to start from.