Problem opening Dr. Watson crash dump in WinDbg

WINDBG
1

I’m running a number of Windows NT 4.0 SP 6a Server machines. Occasionally,
I’ll discover a Dr. Watson error in the logs, and the DRWTSN32.LOG file will
give me a nice crash summary. I’ll then try to open the resulting USER.DMP
with WinDbg (up to and including version 6.1.17.1), but I’ll usually get an
error. Only about 1 in 10 user.dmp files seem to work for me (but
kernel-mode memory.dmp files always work fine). DumpChk gives essentially
the same error:

Loading Dump File [./user.dmp]
User Dump File: Only application data is available
Module list is corrupt
**** DebugClient cannot open DumpFile - error 80070570
DumpFile is corrupt

However, since Dr. Watson created the .DMP, why would it be corrupt? These
machines are unattended, so I know that no one is pressing Cancel on the Dr.
Watson or something like that. Furthermore, the resulting USER.DMP files are
quite large (30 MB or so sometimes), so it seems that they are being
written, though perhaps not fully?

I’ve done some searches through the KB and Google, and I’m not the only
person who sees this often, but alas, no one has had any solutions.

Any suggestions?

2

The answer is described in MS Knowledge Base article Q255271 – there’s a
bug in Dr. Watson for which there is now a patch. It affects all versions
of Windows NT, but nothing else.

I didn’t find it earlier because the error from DumpChk and earlier WinDbg
is “module LIST is corrupt”, but the error mentioned in the article (and
produced by newer WinDbg) is “module TABLE is corrupt”. Arg!