Software Diagnostics Library

Suppose you are debugging a process and you want to send its memory dump to another engineer perhaps in a different company. You also use some symbol files that are not available on public symbol servers or your dump is minidump that requires certain images to be loaded too. Then you can use .dumpcab command to save a dump in a CAB file together with necessary symbols and images. You can only do it when your debugging target is a dump file. If you are debugging a live process you need to save a dump file first:

0:000> .dump /ma c:\UserDumps\notepad.dmp
Creating c:\UserDumps\notepad.dmp - mini user dump
Dump successfully written

Then you open the dump file and create a CAB file from it:

Loading Dump File [C:\UserDumps\notepad.dmp]
User Mini Dump File with Full Memory: Only application data is available

[...]

0:001> .dumpcab -a c:\UserDumps\notepad.cab
Creating a cab file can take a VERY VERY long time
.Ctrl-C can only interrupt the command after a file has been added to the cab.
  Adding C:\UserDumps\notepad.dmp - added
  Adding c:\mss\ntdll.pdb\B958B2F91A5A46B889DAFAB4D140CF252\ntdll.pdb - added
Wrote c:\UserDumps\notepad.cab

Additional information can be found in WinDbg help. 

- Dmitry Vostokov @ DumpAnalysis.org -

This entry was posted on Monday, July 28th, 2008 at 12:48 am and is filed under Crash Dump Analysis, Debugging, WinDbg Tips and Tricks. 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.