title: Need help debugging a minidump with WinDbg
body: <p>I've read a lot of similar questions, but I can't seem to find an answer to exactly what my problem is.</p>
  
  <p>I've got a set of minidumps from a 32-bit application that was running on 64-bit Windows 2008.  The 32-bit Visual Studio on my 32-Bit Vista Business wouldn't touch them at all, so I've been trying to open them in WinDbg.</p>
  
  <p>I don't have the EXACT corresponding .pdb files (we only started saving them AFTER this particular release), but I have .pdbs built by the same machine with the same code.  I also have access to the exact executable that created the minidumps.</p>
  
  <p>I found a nifty little application called ChkMatch that can make .pdbs match an executable... the only difference (according to ChkMatch) was age, so I matched my newer .pdbs to the original executable.</p>
  
  <p>However, when I load it in WinDbg, it still says that it is a "mismatched pdb" then, since I had set <code>.symopts+0x40</code> it tries to load them anyway.  I then get the warning:</p>
  
  <pre><code>*** WARNING: Unable to verify checksum for myexe.exe
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>I ran <code>!lmi myexe</code> and saw that, indeed, the checksum of the executable was in fact zero. From poking around a bit, I've found that the executable should have been built with the <code>/release</code> flag to have a checksum.  That's all well and good, but I can't exactly go back in time and rebuild (if I did though, I'd definitely save the original .pdbs :-P ).</p>
  
  <p>Is there anything I can do here?  Seems a little ridiculous I can't make things match here at least enough to get a call stack.</p>