Howto: Verifying Symbols after taking a Dump

Once the symbols and dump are received by the person who will be debugging, they can use the commands below to check for the symbols being loaded in a debugger such as Windbg after the symbol path is set.  To do this, go into windbg in the debuggers folder and open the dump.  Next, enter the commands below to check the symbols.

    .sympath+ D:\DebugThis\Debug       Add path to application debug symbols to the symbol's path.
    !sym noisy                                      Noisy output while reloading symbols           
    .reload -f                                         Force reloading of symbols
    lm                                                  List modules

You will see the list of modules (dll's, etc) and symbols which match those modules.  If the symbols don't match, then you will see feed back when you load use .reload and lm.

Of course, symchk can still be used to verify the symbols.

Note:  While I'm not going to get into debugging here, I just want to point out that after you enter the commands above, that you can get some error information back easily with the command below. 

     !analyze -v                   Shows information on the error and error code for a crash dump.