Troubleshooting Memory Dumps

A memory dump refers to the actual state of the memory of a computer when the computer has crashed or shut down abnormally. The computer will literally dump everything that it has in its RAM at the time of the crash. The purpose of this function is to help administrators recovers lost data and information in the event of a system crash. The term is used to indicate any time where large amounts of data are deposited or dumped for further analysis and examination. Memory dumps are usually associated with windows based operating systems, but they are also used occasionally by Linux and Unix. When your system crashes, a “snapshot” of a segment of your computer’s memory is taken. This snapshot is then used by troubleshooters to see what exactly when wrong with the machine and how it can be fixed. Other components of program state such as processor registries can also be dumped during a memory dump. On many occasions, any type of fatal error will trigger a memory dump, regardless if the memory is directly affected. Memory dumps are also commonly referred to as core dumps.

The most common causes of memory dumps are buffer overflows or attempting to access memory that does not exist. This usually happens when a programmer attempts to compute or receive data, but has not allocated enough memory to handle the data.

If you do not have a great deal of technical knowledge and encounter a memory dump while working on your home computer, your best bet is to simply delete it since they can occupy a great deal of space on your hard drive. If you lost an important file or program during the memory dump, a person skilled in this type of problem can often help recover the items that you may have lost, in addition to helping identify and fix what caused the memory dump in the first place. Many administrators will use memory dumps as an opportunity to debug their computer.

The most effective way to troubleshoot a memory dump is to use a symbol table to help understand the nature of the dump, capture and freed data during dynamic memory allocation and to use that data to retrieve any lost information.