Requesting Help Setting up Symbols

[suprattalljdm]

Hello SF,

I'm trying to teach myself how to debug crash dumps (so I don't have bug you guys to do it for me ) and I have a question about the symbol files.

I have Debugging Tools installed and have directed the windows symbol server to save files here:

SRV*c:\symbols\downstreamstore*Symbol information

When I opened my dump file, I saw that folder get populated as it downloaded the necessary files. So my question is, how do I reset my Symbol File path to pull from my local drive in the case I do not have internet access to download them? Can I just put it to:

c:\symbols\downstreamstore

Thanks in advance!

 

[zigzag3143]

Hello SF,

I'm trying to teach myself how to debug crash dumps (so I don't have bug you guys to do it for me ) and I have a question about the symbol files.

I have Debugging Tools installed and have directed the windows symbol server to save files here:

SRV*c:\symbols\downstreamstore*Symbol information

When I opened my dump file, I saw that folder get populated as it downloaded the necessary files. So my question is, how do I reset my Symbol File path to pull from my local drive in the case I do not have internet access to download them? Can I just put it to:

c:\symbols\downstreamstore

Thanks in advance!

In a way you dont really want to. MS is only contacted when the local symbol folder doesnt have a particular symbel. If you change to just the local folder, it wont get the missing symbols

Hope this helps

Ken

 

[H2SO4]

Hello SF,

I'm trying to teach myself how to debug crash dumps (so I don't have bug you guys to do it for me ) and I have a question about the symbol files.

I have Debugging Tools installed and have directed the windows symbol server to save files here:

SRV*c:\symbols\downstreamstore*Symbol information

When I opened my dump file, I saw that folder get populated as it downloaded the necessary files. So my question is, how do I reset my Symbol File path to pull from my local drive in the case I do not have internet access to download them? Can I just put it to:

c:\symbols\downstreamstore

Thanks in advance!

The sympath you've already got (in colours up above) does exactly what you want. When it needs a symbol file, the debugger goes through the following procedure:

1) Check in the local path specified (green). If the required symbol is not to be found there...
2) Attempt to download it from the MS symbol server (blue). If found...
3) Cache the symbol in the local loaction.

Hence, whatever symbols you've pulled down locally during your debugging sessions will still be available offline.


EDIT: Sorry Zigzag, I didn't see your response until after I posted this!

 

[torrentg]

Do the symbols ever update and change versions at all on the server?

Or is it once downloaded, always the same forever?

 

[H2SO4]

Do the symbols ever update and change versions at all on the server?

Or is it once downloaded, always the same forever?

Every version of every "executable" (EXE, DLL, SYS...) has a corresponding symbol (usually *.PDB). For example, the 7100 version of ntdll.dll has different symbols to the RTM version of the same file. The debugger knows internally whether a particular PDB is the right one for a particular executable, and if not it scours the MS symbol server for what it needs, assuming the sympath is set up to point at the MS symbol server.

Since Win7 is still very new, there's only a handful of file versions and your local symbols cache won't be very large. By comparison, if you're in the habit of debugging XP dumps, the local SymCache will grow gargantuan, over time, because every hotfix, every update, and every SP introduces new versions of many executables. It's probably not exaggeration to say that there are hundreds of versions of XP's ntdll.dll, and each has a separate symbols PDB.