Janet E. said:
My customer has Vista. My company's software product "stops working" when
he
takes certain actions. Our engineers want to see a Dr. Watson log from
him
so they can diagnose the problem. How can I get a Dr. Watson log from my
Vista customer so I can give it to engineering? drwtsn32 does not work on
Hi Janet,
The Dr Watson debugger is obsolete. There is no Dr Watson in Vista. It has
been superceded by Windows Error Reporting (WER).
The ideal solution for your company would be to add WER to your application.
Then when a customer hits an exception, a report will be automatically sent
to Microsoft. ISVs can arrange to retrieve the crash details from
Microsoft - for details, see
https://winqual.microsoft.com/help/default.htm#Developers_Guide_to_WER.htm
But, in the short term .... on Vista, WER will create a mini-dump file of
the process, when the application crashes. This has a *.mdmp extension. It
is written to the Drive:\Users\UserName\AppData\Local\Temp directory. The
user can also access this file by going to Control Panel, System and
Maintenance, Problem Reports and Solutions, View Problem History. Highlight
the crash, in the list of problems, rigth click and choose View Problem
Details. If a dump was created for the crash, the details will include a
link entitled "View a temporary copy of these files". This opens an Explorer
window on the directory containing the mini-dump and othe supporting
diagnostic files. The user can drag and drop these files to another
location, to send to you.
The mini-dump file is an ordinary Windows Dump file. Your engineer guys can
load it up in WinDBG and then issue the "!analyze -v" command. This will
print out a report with all the same information contained in a Dr Watson
Log, and much more besides. I'd assume they are familiar with the Windows
Debugging Tools, but WinDBG etc can be downloaded from here:
http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/DevTools/Debugging/default.mspx
These are the premier tools for debugging Windows. More information on how
to use WinDBG is here:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/315263
I'd strongly recommend your engineers start using WinDBG and WER minidumps
to analyse problems, because Dr Watson is finished, discontinued, it is not
included in Windows any more. It's just going to get harder and harder to
debug problems, and eventually impossible, if they continue to rely on
DrWatson logs. WinDBG and a minidump will show everything that is in a
DrWatson log and more.
However, for the sake of completeness, the Drwtsn32.exe binary can still
run, on Vista. To use Dr Watson on Vista:
- get the drwtsn32.exe binary file from a machine running XP SP2 or Windows
Server 2003
- copy it across to the C:\Windows\System32 directory on the Vista machine.
- run this command to install DrWatson as the default system debugger:
C:\Windows\System32\drwtsn32 -i
- now run "drwtsn32" (with no paramters) to bring up the Dr Watson
configuration dialogue. Configure Dr Watson as desired. Dr Watson is now
installed as teh default system debugger, and wil be called whenver there is
an unhandled exception.
Note that this will leave Dr Watson installed on te machine in perpetuity.
There's probably some way to uninstall Dr Watson as the default debugger,
but ... I dunno how. Left as an exercise for the reader, I guess. You'll
probably need to tweak the AeDebug key in the registry. Maybe back up the
AeDebug registry key *before* installing Dr Watson (eg export it to a *.reg
file) and then restore it after you're finished using Dr Watson.
In summary - by far the best solution is to forget using Dr Watson, and come
to grips with examining the mini-dump using WinDBG. After the initial
setting up, this is a very simple and easy process, and shows all the same
info and more, as a Dr Watson log. If you really, *really* need to get a Dr
Watson log (I don't believe it, but anyway ...) then you can run the Dr
Watson EXE from XP or Server 2003 on a Vista machine. However this may
interfere with future WER reporting on that workstation, unless you
uninstall Dr Watson afterwards.
Hope it helps,
