PDB file from different versions of Visual Studio

Question

I have an old DLL file which was built with VC++ 6. Now I need to investigate the dump file but I don't have its PDB available. The stacktrace reported by WinDbg is also inaccurate.

Is it possible to rebuild the project with later versions of Visual Studio i.e. 2003, 2005, 2008, have the PDB generated, and use this to map addresses to symbols in the old DLL? Is there something like VC 6.0 compatible mode for building project?

Obtaining VC++ 6 is one option, but it looks like VS6.0 has already vanished from MSDN subscriber download page :(

Thanks!

Answer 1

I'm afraid I think the answer is no: you'll need to try and rebuild it with the same tool-chain exactly as the binary that generated the dump file you have.

VS is really fussy about how it matches dump files to pdb files in my experience: the only luck I've ever had in these situations is with WinDbg (but you've tried that)/