WinDbg to analyze the crash dump doesn't work on the local pc

Question

I developed a tiny MFC application that is going to run on the server 24 hours. (Windows Server 2008 R2, x64)

I made the app crash on purpose to see if its minidump file is properly created and working, and it works with WinDbg.

Here how I did.

0:000> .symfix c:\symbols
0:000> .sympath+ C:\Projects\*********\x64\Release
0:000> .reload
0:000> !analyze -v 
-> Works! I can see full call stack and the line where the error occured!

But, when I do the same thing on my local laptop(Windows XP, x86) All I can see in call stack text is very basic information as below. (It doesn't either show what line I should take a look at to debug.)

STACK_TEXT:  
0012fd60 0040695c 00000004 dd0fbe7e 00d67d10 **************!CWnd::RunModalLoop+0xf7
0012fdac 004010e0 dd0fbcce 0056bae8 0056bae8 **************!CDialog::DoModal+0x130
0012ff1c 0050e492 00380032 00000000 7ffde000 **************!**************::InitInstance+0xa0
0012ff30 004f7bd7 00400000 00000000 00020934 **************!AfxWinMain+0x48
0012ffc0 7c7e7077 00380032 002d0033 7ffde000 **************!__tmainCRTStartup+0x11a
0012fff0 00000000 004f7c2a 00000000 00000000 kernel32!BaseProcessStart+0x23
-> Meaningless information in this case b/c the error occurs in OnBnClicked function.

I spent several hours googling, but feel lost looking for the answer to this. Why doesn't it work ONLY on my laptop pc?

What should I check? What am I missing? Any idea would be very appreciated. Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

You will need the same pdbs without private symbols removed accessible from your laptop in order to get sensible call stacks with correct source line information, also I notice you seem to have cached some symbols to c:\symbols are these the same and also resolve the windows symbols?

Check your visual c++ settings to make sure that you are not stripping private symbols from the pdbs, it will most likely warn you when you try to set breakpoints, search symbols or perform a crash analysis by stating that it was unable to verify the checksum or similar message.

I also notice you are running your app on a 64 bit server and then on a 32 bit laptop, are you running the correct version of WinDbg is my next question, there are 32 and 64 bit versions.

Also what version of windbg are you using? There are often bugs with various versions so you may want to check you are running the same version on your laptop as on your server.