Despite the fact that Windows’ still continues to enjoy the lion’s share of the operating system market, the truth is that it experiences something that Linux systems never do – crashes. Yet it’s not all bad news, thanks to the creation of ‘crash dump files’ which saves your information before the crash occurs – an excellent tool to use if you want to troubleshoot the error. So, here are steps that will show you how to use dump files as you work towards a solution:

#1: How to Set Up a Dump File
Follow the path: Start > Settings > Control Panel > System. Once this is done, select the ‘Advanced’ tab and ‘Settings’ which is under the ‘Startup and Recovery’ header. Finally, look for the list titled ‘Write debugging information’ and pick the small memory option.

#2: Using the Dump Check Utility For this, you will have to first insert the Windows CD-ROM and open the Support/ Tools folder.
Once you do this, run the Setup.exe file to install the content of the folder. Now, open the Dumpchk.exe and scan the options for reading and downloading the file some of which include extra file validation, dump exam, dump validation, image search for the dump exam and symbol search for the dump exam.
Now, run the scan and read the output and what you will obtain a report of all the errors that Dumpchk.exe has found.

#3: Debugging the Dump File
The first step is to download the Windows debugging files from their website and install it on your computer. Now open the dump file by selecting ‘Start’ and then ‘Run’. Now type the string ‘cmd’ and ‘OK’. After this, type ‘cd c:\program files\debugging tools for
windows’ and hit Enter to open the folder. Now load the dump file by typing ‘windbg -y SymbolPath -i ImagePath -z DumpFilePath’. Finally,

in order to open the dump within the debugging software, type ‘kd -y srv*c:\symbols*http://msdl.microsoft.com/download/symbols -i c:\windows\i386 -z c:\windows\minidump\minidump.dmp’.