Looking at crashes that watson has stored

When a crash happens in Vista and Windows Server 2008, Windows will automatically write out a dump file for the crash. It stores this file, on the machine so that you can upload it to the Windows Error Reporting (WER) site to see if this is a known issue.

So what if you want to look at a given box and see if any of the crashes are known issues?  What if you want to try running these crashes through DebugDiag?

Well, we don't have an automated way to do this currently, but DebugDiag has a script interface which allows you to automate running it.  So I am considering creating a script that will go into the folder where these are and open up each subfolder to look for a cab file.  If it finds one, it will extract the file to a temp folder and add it to a list of dumps.  Then we will run DebugDiag against each of these files to create reports.  The script, when completed, will just write the reports into the current directory.

If you like what you are reading, get it from the source: https://blogs.msdn.com/tom

I wanted to see if there was interest in this before I went ahead and created the script.  I have started looking into it so that I know it is possible to do, but I wanted to see if people would want such a script or if just finding the files is enough.

Until the script is created, I will just tell you how to get the files yourself and extract them.  The easiest way is just with the Problem Reports and Solutions applet in control panel.

Then click on the “View problem history” on the left to see all the problems on the machine:

You find the one you are interested in and double-click on the problem and you will see the information for the it.  Scrolling down to the bottom of the problem, you will see something like:

If you click on the “View a temporary copy of these files” you will get a version that you can pass to DebugDiag directly. It will either be a mdmp file or hdmp file most likely.  But DebugDiag should handle both file types just fine.

So please let me know if you have an interest in the script and I’ll get started on it.