What is the “Break instruction exception” in WinDbg?

Question

I\'m debugging some random crash bugs, but actually very difficult to go deep into. Because when i open crash dump, only find one error:

0:000> .exr -1
Excep         


        

Answer 1

The command to use to find the exception that caused the crash dump is .ecxr. The outpt you got from .exr -1 is incorrect as the ExceptionAddress is zero.

Answer 2

For future reference, the Your debugger is not using the correct symbols warning is caused because you need to add Windows symbols to the Windbg symbols path. Here is how to do that:

Set Microsoft symbol server path automatically:

0:000> .symfix

Optionally you can specify an additional location where to download symbol from, e.g.:

0:000> .sympath+ c:\myproject

Check current symbol search path:

0:000> .sympath 

You should see something like this:

SRV**http://msdl.microsoft.com/download/symbols

Reload symbols:

0:000> .reload 

Then, you will be able to see information about the current exception using this command:

0:000> !analyze -v

You should see a line similar to the following:

ExceptionCode: c0000005 (Access violation)

Good luck fixing bugs!