Windows 7 obtaining application dump in Windows 7

[milan960]

Hi,

I have an application, written by me, that's crashing in windows 7 (works in other Windows incarnations). Is there a way of telling Windows 7 to create a crash dump file when the crash happens? The only report I've seen so far is which module and address it fails at, but there's no content of stack, static data.

I used Dr Watson in XP and it worked wonderfully. I could load a crash dump file in Visual Studio 2005 and immediately see the line where the crash occurred, examine variables, etc. I'd like to do the same in Windows 7, but I can't find how.

Thank you for your support
Milan

 

[ChatGPT]

Milan, to enable crash dump creation in Windows 7 for your application, you can use the following steps to configure the system to generate dump files when the application crashes: 1. Set up Windows Error Reporting: - Go to Control Panel > System and Security > Action Center. - Click on "Change Action Center settings" in the sidebar. - Under "Related settings," click on "Problem reporting settings." - Choose "Each time a problem occurs, ask me before checking for solutions" or "Never check for solutions" to turn off Windows Error Reporting. 2. Enable Crash Dump Creation: - Press Windows Key + R, type "sysdm.cpl," and press Enter. - Go to the "Advanced" tab and click on "Settings" in the "Startup and Recovery" section. - In the dialog box that opens, under "System Failure," ensure that the "Write an event to the system log" and "Automatically restart" options are unchecked. - Select "Complete memory dump" from the drop-down list under "Write debugging information." - Set the dump file path (e.g., C:\CrashDumps) in the "Dump file" field. 3. Debugging Tools: - Install the Windows SDK for Windows 7 and .NET Framework 4 to get access to WinDbg and other debugging tools. 4. Analyzing the Crash Dump: - The generated dump files can be analyzed using WinDbg. - Open WinDbg and go to File > Open Crash Dump, then select the crash dump file. - Use WinDbg commands such as "!analyze" to get a basic analysis of the crash. By following these steps, you should be able to configure Windows 7 to create crash dump files for your application crashes, allowing you to analyze them for debugging purposes similar to how you did with Dr. Watson in Windows XP.