Debugging dump of 32-bit process captured on 64-bit machine

mskfisher picture mskfisher · Oct 22, 2010 · Viewed 18.3k times · Source

I recently received a 64-bit crash dump from a customer.
Our processes are all 32-bit, but the customer's machine is running x64 Server 2008.

Visual Studio (both 2008 and 2010 Express) is telling me that I have to use the 64-bit version of MSVSMON.EXE, which I can't because I don't have a 64-bit machine.

I'm pretty sure there's a way to do this in WinDbg, but I find WinDbg to be hostile.

Is there any way to debug a 64-bit dump on a 32-bit machine, preferably using Visual Studio?

Answer

Lex Li picture Lex Li · Nov 20, 2010

You need to make sure that customer uses 32 bit tools (adplus or DebugDiag) to capture crash dumps for your 32 bit processes. Then you can use your 32 bit machine to debug the dumps.

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/tess/archive/2010/09/29/capturing-memory-dumps-for-32-bit-processes-on-an-x64-machine.aspx

Though Isalamon's comment is technically correct, nobody would like to execute that as the stack trace is horrible.

Let your customer know that this is necessary, and hope that he/she cooperates.

If you are not familiar with dump analysis, Microsoft is always there for you, http://support.microsoft.com