How to get crash dump in Windows 8.1 without using WinDbg

Question

I have a user who is running one of my apps, and he is seeing the app crash. How can I get a crash dump from his computer without asking him to use WinDbg?

I have read other questions, and this was easy to do in Windows XP using Dr. Watson, but it seems that option is not available in Windows 8.1 anymore.

Other answer points to c:\Users\[user]\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows\WER\ReportArchive directory, but I only see WER files there.

Any idea how to get crash dumps?

Thanks.

Answer 1

I wrote a program to trap WER crash dumps. I was able to use the keys mentioned in this article to trap the dump file locally. The only subtle requirement was that the program had to run with administrator rights. If you follow this methodology, make sure you run the program again to disable trapping crash reports because changing those keys could affect all future crash dumps for other applications.

Answer 2

ProcDump from SysInternals.

Register as the Just-in-Time (AeDebug) debugger. Makes full dumps in c:\dumps.

C:\>procdump -ma -i c:\dumps