Question

I’ve got a Windows minidump (C code) and a corresponding exe file. Unfortunately, I don’t have the exact matching .pdb files, but I do have .pdbs that contain the exact same code just built at a different time. In Windbg, I can use:

.symopt+0x40

To tell it to load anything, even mismatched symbol files. This works great in this particular instance, and I’m able to get a proper call stack. I’m just curious as to whether or not Visual Studio has any such feature. We use pretty much every different version of VS here, so it doesn’t matter which version it might be in. Thanks.

Answer 1

There is no override, but the poster to this question found a way to modify the PDB files to make them match the EXE.

Thanks to one of the comments on the
first answer, I checked out a link to
the pdfs of the book “Undocumented
Windows 2000 Secrets: A Programmers
Cookbook”. And the author goes into
great detail about the pdb file
format. As I said before, I had
already loaded the pdb into a hex
editor and flipped some bits around
appearing that I made the
age/signature match, but it didn’t
work. Well, after using the utility
from the W2k secrets book to “explode”
the pdb into the included streams, I
found out that they hide another
reference to the age in stream
3!!!!!!! Once I flipped that one as
well, it matched up in windbg.

Not sure if you want to go to this much trouble, but it looks like it can be done. If this is for production support then it could be worth your while.