Microsoft's WinDbg is a tool you can use to help diagnose problems with your PC and guide you in the right direction to troubleshoot application / system crashes. If an application or process stops responding, Windows will attempt to recover to prevent your system from crashing. If Windows is insucccesful, your PC may experience a bugcheck/blue screen and reboot. Windows will attempt to save a log of the error on your PC as a Windows crash dump file. You may use WinDbg to analyze the crash dump files that are created by Windows.
Setting up WinDbg (Microsoft Windows 10 and Windows 11 only):
1. Click the "Download WinDbg" button under the "Install WinDbg directly" section to download the WinDbg installer from the URL below:
2. Once downloaded, open the installer file and follow the prompts to proceed with the installation process.
3. After the installation has completed, open WinDbg from the Windows Start:
4. From the menu bar, select File -> Settings -> Debugging settings. In the Default symbol path:, type the following location as shown in the screenshot below and then select OK:
srv*https://msdl.microsoft.com/download/symbols
Location of Windows crash dump files - Windows saves crash dump files in separate locations based on the type of crash.
- For application/driver crashes (crash dump file usually contains a partial name of the application or process in the filename):
%LOCALAPPDATA%\CrashDumps
or
C:\Windows\LiveKernelReports\WATCHDOG
- For Windows bugcheck/blue screen of death w/ system reboot:
C:\Windows\Memory.dmp
or
C:\Windows\Minidump\
or
C:\Windows\Minidump\
Double-click on the dump file to open it inside of the WinDbg application.
Analyzing a Windows crash dump files:
1. After opening your crash dump file inside of WinDbg, click on the !analyze - v link as shown in the screenshot below
2. After a few seconds, WinDbg will come back with an error code and process that crashed. You may be able to use this to further troubleshoot your issue. For example, in the screenshot below, the error code is:
c0000005
c0000005
This error code is an Access Violation Error which typically means an application or process failed at trying to access an address. This can be a result of:
- Overclocked or defective system RAM - Try going into your motherboard settings and if your RAM is overclocked, change the timings to default timings. You may also want to try removing individual memory sticks to see if any are faulty. If your CPU is overclocked, we suggest removing the overclock settings as well as a test. Last but not least, check if a newer motherboard BIOS is available which may provide better compatibility with the PC components installed.
- Corrupt application - Reinstalling/verifying the integrity of the appplication files may resolve this. .
- 3rd party anti-virus programs - Certain 3rd party anti-virus programs can block other files from gaining permissions to access certain addresses or locations. Disabling background scanning and reinstalling the application may resolve this.
- 3rd party anti-cheat software - Some games will install separate anti-cheat software which can conflict with other programs which can lead to access violations.
- Mixed drivers or permission issue - If WinDbg is pointing to a driver file, download the latest version available. Once downloaded, right-click over the installation file and select "Run as administrator" so that Windows will grant it the proper permissions to install correctly.
You may use 3rd party AI chatbots such as ChatGPT, Claude, Copilot, Gemini, Grok, Perplexity AI, etc. and ask it to diagnose other types of Windows crash dump error codes and possible solutions.