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Motivated by the previous post I decided to try better alternatives because on new Vista installation you don’t have either drwtsn32.exe or NTSD.

Any application that can attach to a process based on its PID and save its memory state in a dump will do. The first obvious candidate is userdump.exe which actually can setup itself in the registry properly. Here is the detailed instruction. If you already have the latest version of userdump.exe you can skip the first two steps:

1. Download the latest User Mode Process Dumper from Microsoft. At the time of this writing it has version 8.1

2. Run the downloaded executable file and it will prompt to unzip. By default the current version unzips to c:\kktools\userdump8.1. Do not run setup afterwards because it is not needed for our purposes.

3. Create kktools folder in system32 folder

4. Create the folder where userdump will save your dumps; I use c:\UserDumps in my example

5. Copy dbghelp.dll and userdump.exe from x86 or x64 folder depending on the version of Windows you use to system32\kktools folder you created in step 3.

6. Run the elevated command prompt and enter the following command:

C:\Windows\System32\kktools>userdump -I -d c:\UserDumps
User Mode Process Dumper (Version 8.1.2929.5)
Copyright (c) Microsoft Corp. All rights reserved.
Userdump set up Aedebug registry key.

7. Check the following registry key:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\AeDebug
Debugger=C:\Windows\system32\kktools\userdump -E %ld %ld -D c:\UserDumps\
Auto=0

You can set Auto to 1 if you want to see the following dialog every time you have a crash:

8. Test the new settings by using TestDefaultDebugger

9. When you have a crash userdump.exe will show a window on top of your screen while saving the dump file:

Of course, you can setup userdump.exe as the postmortem debugger on other Windows platforms. The problem with userdump.exe is that it overwrites the previous process dump because it uses the module name for the dump file name, for example, TestDefaultDebugger.dmp, so you need to rename or save the dump if you have multiple crashes for the same application.

Other programs can be setup instead of userdump.exe. One of them is WinDbg. Here is the article I wrote about WinDbg so I won’t repeat its content here, except the registry key I tested on Vista:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\AeDebug
Debugger="C:\Program Files\Debugging Tools for Windows\windbg.exe" -p %ld -e %ld -g -c '.dump /o /ma /u c:\UserDumps\new.dmp; q' -Q -QS -QY -QSY

Finally you can use command line CDB user mode debugger from Debugging Tools for Windows. Here is the registry key:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\AeDebug
Debugger="C:\Program Files\Debugging Tools for Windows\cdb.exe" -p %ld -e %ld -g -c ".dump /o /ma /u c:\UserDumps\new.dmp; q"

When you have a crash cdb.exe will be launched and the following console window will appear:

The advantage of using CDB or WinDbg is that you can omit q from the -c command line option and leave your debugger window open for further process inspection.

- Dmitry Vostokov -

           

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This entry was posted on Sunday, May 20th, 2007 at 9:49 am and is filed under Crash Dump Analysis, Debugging, Tools, Vista. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.