Archive for October 31st, 2007

Memory dumps from VMware images

Wednesday, October 31st, 2007

Although I haven’t found the way to distinguish the process dump taken from a physical machine versus virtualized machine there is a way to see it from kernel and complete memory dumps if VMware Tools are installed inside the guest Windows OS:

kd> !vm
...
...
...
         1098 VMwareUser.exe     350 (      1400 Kb)
...
         14e4 VMwareTray.exe     317 (      1268 Kb)
...
         0664 VMwareService.e    190 (       760 Kb)
...
...
...

In case of a kernel minidump we can check for VMware drivers (as we can obviously do with kernel and complete memory dumps):

kd> lmt m vm*
start    end        module name
bf9e6000 bf9faa80   vmx_fb    Tue Oct 04 08:13:32 2005
f6e8b000 f6e8ed80   vmx_svga  Tue Oct 04 08:13:02 2005
f77e7000 f77ede80   vmxnet    Sat Apr 22 23:13:11 2006
f7997000 f7998200   vmmouse   Tue Aug 02 20:07:49 2005
f79c9000 f79ca5c0   vmmemctl  Thu Jul 26 21:50:03 2007

If VMware Tools are not installed we can check machine id:

kd> !sysinfo machineid
Machine ID Information [From Smbios 2.31, DMIVersion 0, Size=1642]
BiosVendor = Phoenix Technologies LTD
BiosVersion = 6.00
BiosReleaseDate = 04/17/2006
SystemManufacturer = VMware, Inc.
SystemProductName = VMware Virtual Platform

SystemVersion = None
BaseBoardManufacturer = Intel Corporation
BaseBoardProduct = 440BX Desktop Reference Platform
BaseBoardVersion = None

- Dmitry Vostokov @ DumpAnalysis.org -

Patterns on Portal

Wednesday, October 31st, 2007

Some Crash Dump Analysis (CDA) Portal announcements:

  • Registration-free - no need to register. This has been done to remove administration overhead. Thanks for everyone who has registered so far.

  • CDA Patterns are listed on the right side bar. These most popular posts from my blog are made readily accessible:

- Dmitry Vostokov @ DumpAnalysis.org -