I wish get your recommendations for central analysis of BSODs software. I have a bunch of dumps which I wish to analyze and understand the root cause for the system crash.
Which tools/applications could I use?
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1I'm not exactly sure where it's written, but the rules for this site typically require some price info, whether you want to use is standalone or on a server, a web-app or similar and which features the tool must have. If possible, be a little bit more specific regarding the environment in which the tool might be used: are you a developer, service provider or an admin of an IT department?– Thomas WellerJun 20 '16 at 19:34
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@ThomasWeller 100% agree – and it's on our Meta: What is required for a question to contain "enough information"?– Izzy ♦Jun 20 '16 at 19:37
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For IT departments
Nirsoft Bluescreenview is a nice tool to show the content of a BSOD the same way it was displayed on the screen. This is often sufficient to find out the data needed for googling a problem (like the STOP code etc.). This is fine if your task is mainly of IT administrative nature.
- Bluescreenview is free
- and portable
The central factor here is that it will collect all BSODs of one PC automatically.
The downside is: you can't do an in-depth analysis. It may be a starting point to find the right BSOD to be later analyzed in WinDbg (as mentioned before).
answered Jun 20 '16 at 19:26
For kernel driver developers
Windows kernel crash dumps can be analyzed with WinDbg (pronounce "windebug", "windbag" or "win-dee-bee-gee").
- WinDbg is provided by Microsoft (MSDN) for free.
- Once installed, you can simply copy the directory, so basically it's even portable.
Regarding the central analysis of crashes, you can e.g. run it on a server and write scripts (MSDN) to automate the analysis for you. However, note that there are dozens of potential causes and writing a good script may take some time. The !analyze -v command already does a lot for you.
Assuming that you're mainly interested in debugging your own software (as opposed to doing Microsoft a favor and analyzing their issues), you have to set up your own symbol server (Stack Overflow).
WinDbg is very powerful and probably the only tool up-to-date with the latest versions of Microsoft Windows, since Microsoft itself uses it for debugging the OS.
Becoming familiar with WinDbg is a hard task, though. It took me years to profoundly answer questions about it - and I do user mode debugging only. Maybe a kernel driver developer can become familiar with WinDbg a bit faster.
answered Jun 20 '16 at 19:21
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Thanks Thomas for the answers the info was very helpfull and sorry for not being clear about my request to begin with. I am familiar with both the windbg and the Bluescreenview. I am an It professional looking for the best application to analyze my organization system crashes, therefore the below requirement are important: • A server based application should be the best option for me. • It could be either free or paid where budget shouldn't be an issue. • The most important analyses output would be (as displayed in windbg output): o Probably caused by. o Process name. Jun 25 '16 at 18:49
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@Edcoolest: ok, then your problem is more to collect the crashes from the clients, send them to you so that you can use WinDbg to analyze? Jun 27 '16 at 5:11