NMI

When Windows NT sees an NMI, it will print a message and halt. Neither I/O nor memory buffers will be flushed, nor will any other part of an orderly shutdown be performed. A full cold start will be required to reboot. NMI should only be raised in circumstances in which such an immediate halt is the desired action. Power-fail, I/O failure, and even some benign memory failures are NOT justification for raising an NMI--the desired reaction in these cases is an orderly shutdown.

The correct use of NMI is to report when data being returned to the processor from memory is wrong. NMI should never be used to report an I/O error.