Manual crash dumps are useful for diagnosing application hangs or freezes. Due to the size of manual crash dumps though, please do not send them in unrequested. To create a manual crash dump, Microsoft's ProcDump utility may be used.
- Download ProcDump from the Microsoft website.
- Once you have downloaded the Procdump.zip file, right click on it and choose 'Extract all…', and save it to a directory of your choice. A recommended location might be a ProcDump folder on your Desktop, such as
C:\Users\User Name\Desktop\ProcDumpwhere "User Name" is your own user name. - Open a console Window. To do this, type 'cmd' into the Windows search box (Cortana on Windows 10) and wait for 'Command prompt' to appear. Right-click on it and choose 'Run as administrator'. Say yes to the UAC prompt that may appear.
- Change directory (cd) to the location ProcDump.zip was extracted to by executing (typing the command and pressing Enter) the following command, making sure to put a space between the command (cd) and the argument (ProcDump_path):
cd "<ProcDump_path>"
For example, the command to type might be:
cd "C:\Users\User Name\Desktop\ProcDump"
This assumes you may have created a ProcDump folder on your desktop, and put the Procdump program in it. The quotes are important if there are any spaces in the path. This is true for many commands, not just cd. - Create the process dump by executing the following command, or the one provided by a helper:
ProcDump.exe -ma <process name or PID (Process ID)>
A few examples:
ProcDump.exe -ma a2service.exe
ProcDump.exe -ma 512
The crash dump will be saved in the ProcDump directory and will be named based on the process name and the current time/date.