How to create a crash dump in Windows

Overview

Dump files provide a snapshot of a system's memory before a process crashes. On Windows, you can create a crash dump file manually from a running process, where execution will be suspended while the dump is created. The instructions below demonstrate how to do this.

Note that this may result in timeout errors when your process resumes execution. If you would like to enable crash dump files to be created automatically on your system when a process crashes, see this article (How to generate core dump files).

Environment

Operating System: Windows


Instructions

1. Start Windows Task Manager

IF YOU ARE ON WINDOWS x64, start the 64-BIT version of Windows Task Manager: C:Windows\SysWOW64\taskmgr.exe
IF YOU ARE ON WINDOWS x32, start the regular version of Windows Task Manager: C:Windows\System32\taskmgr.exe
You need the 32-bit version of Task Manager to create a 32-bit dump of a 32-bit process. If you use the 64-bit version of Task Manager, you will create a 64-bit dump of a 32-bit process. These are useful for stack traces but much harder to work with.

2. Go to the Windows Task Manager window

3. Click to select the Processes tab

4. Select the process you want to dump.

5. Right-click to open the context menu, then click to select Create Dump File.

Task Manager will create a dump file somewhere like C:\Users\Documents\AppData?\Local\Temp\procname.DMP. Send this file to Aspera Support.

6. NOTE WHAT VERSION OF THE EXECUTABLE you just dumped. Developers need to know the build number to interpret the dump correctly, but this information is not contained in the dump.