Vista - How to read mini-dump files?

Hi,
I've been getting fairly regular BSOD on my Vista machine (both before
and after installing SP1). I'm trying to view the mini-dump files, as
it appears others have gotten mileage out of that in looking for
drivers to update.

"DebugDiag failed to locate the PEB (Process Environment Block) in
Mini042108-01.dmp, and as a result, debug analysis for this dump may
be incomplete or inaccurate."

I've tried with 2 files, and get the same response on both. [That's
with the Crash/Hang analyzers; the Memory Pressure analyzers seem to
work, giving me a list of what appears to be processes running and
memory allocated to each.]

So does the dump file just not have the info I'm expecting (given the
failure mode*, I'd expect that "Crash/Hang" analyzers would be the
thing to look at, not that I really understand what they are)? Or am I
doing something wrong?


*FWIW, mainly the way this goes is that my (wireless) internet
connection starts to give me problems, so I try to troubleshoot by
clicking on the "Currently connected to" icon in the system tray, but
oddly that doesn't work; clicking on it does nothing and hovering over
the icon doesn't even pop up the connection name and status.
So I decide to shut down and the machine clearly hangs in the process
(says "Shutting Down" for over 15 minutes!). Eventually I leave it to
its thing and come back a while later and it's re-booted, and I get
the "Windows Has Recovered from an Unexpected Shutdown" message with
problem event name BlueScreen, etc.

Oh, and this is Vista Home Premium SP1 32-bit.

Thanks!
Joe Candelora

bigjoe -- "dump" files are the basis for crash analysis - however the debug
and symbol files necessary to perform the analysis are not availalbe
"locally" requiring the dump file to be sent to Microsoft's crash analysis
site.

Microsoft does provide a "Crash Analysis" utility via Software Assurance to
Enterprise customers.

<bigjoec@xxxxxx> wrote in message
news:e3630cec-1526-448c-8f01-937c0306b0bd@xxxxxx

Minidump reader

See the third post in the thread.

<bigjoec@xxxxxx> wrote in message
news:e3630cec-1526-448c-8f01-937c0306b0bd@xxxxxx