Reading a windows *.dmp file

Question

I was wonder if any knows how to open up a windows *.dmp file after a application crash written C/C++.

Answer 1

Here's a link to an article from Microsoft on reading the small memory dump files that Windows creates for debugging

Answer 2

If you mean a dump file created by windows (either small memory dump, kernel memory dump or full memory dump) that is created after a system crash then you need WinDBG

ref: http://www.microsoft.com/ddk/debugging/installx86.asp

Answer 3

You should be able to just double click the .dmp file to automatically open it in Visual Studio. If the .pdb file that was generated when the program was compiled is still around, Visual Studio should be able to automatically load the symbols from that. From then on, you can just hit Run/Debug (F5) to start peeking into the .dmp file.

Answer 4

Using Visual Studio's File>Open Project or the free WinDbg's (part of Debugging Tools for Windows) File>Open Crash Dump select the dmp file.

Make sure to configure the tools to include a path to the location of the PDB debugging symbols for that application (you do have symbols right?). Either tool has a thread and call stack window that should give you a good idea where the crash occurred. Including paths to the source code will help as well.

Symbol and Source paths can be set in WinDbg under the File menu. It's buried in Visual Studio under Tools>Options>Debugging>Symbols and Tools>Options>Project and Solutions>VC++ Directores

Answer 5

When using Debugging Tools for Windows be sure to setup symbols. For Microsoft symbols use: SRV*DownstreamStore*http://msdl.microsoft.com/download/symbols

For example: SRV*c:\websymbols*http://msdl.microsoft.com/download/symbols

Take a look at these blogs for more on debugging:

• http://blogs.msdn.com/tom
• http://blogs.msdn.com/ntdebugging
• http://blogs.msdn.com/tess