Windows Minidump Reader

I just got a Windows XP bluescreen of death (BSOD) on my laptop, first one ever, apart from the self-inflicted SATA enabled one after an reinstall that didn’t bring with it the SATA drivers for my SATA hard drive.

So, there were three new devices connected when it crashed and forced a powerdown – my iPod, a Corsair Padlock and my new 250GB secondary hard drive…

When I restarted the machine, I got back into Windows with no apparent problems. A dialog box popped up to tell me “The system has recovered from a serious error”. A log of the error has been created and I should click here for more information, which displays this message and tells me to follow another link to the technical information:

BCCode : 10000050 BCP1 : BAD0B148 BCP2 : 00000000 BCP3 : 805BA28D
BCP4 : 00000000 OSVer : 5_1_2600 SP : 2_0 Product : 256_1

The technical information is held in two files in a temp folder called WERc712.dir00 called Mini112708-01.dmp and sysdata.xml with a manifest.txt file basically saying the above in terse speak.

Okay, I so try and open the files. sysdata.xml looks like an inventory of my hardware, which you might expect, but the minidump (.dmp) file, as I expected is unreadable. So, off to Google to find a minidump reader. Apparently, I need a file called dumpchk.zip, which is available in the downloads section of jsiinc.com. Unfortunately, that section is no more, it has ceased to be, the owner having retired in 2006.

So, next stop the Wayback Machine on archive.org. If you’d not come across this site before, you’re in for a treat. Anyway, the link for dumpchk.zip on jsiinc.com is present dated 2000. http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.jsiinc.com/dl/dumpchk.zip. A quick download and a virus scan and I’m firing up my zip program. There’s just one file in the zip, the imaginatively named dumpchk.exe, which extracts in seconds and is virus scanned just as quickly.

DumpCHK.exe is a DOS program and obviously too old to handle my XP minidump even after renaming it to memory.dmp as it simply says it is unable to initialize the memory.dmp file.

So, back to Google…of course…I should’ve got it straight from the horse’s mouth: http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/devtools/debugging/installx86.mspx#ERB This link leads to the Microsoft 32-bit debugging tool, which I hoped would allow me to read the minidump file and to find out which component was to blame for the crash.

Well, that little tool pinged up all kinds of internal errors of its own, but one line stood out:

Unable to load image ntoskrnl.exe, Win32 error 0n2

But, that’s such a generic error message and brings me up to a dead-end…so any thoughts, anyone seen this kind of thing before and have any idea of what might be going on.