A couple of questions about DMP files

[TroyWells]

I've recently discovered .dmp files. I've read an MS KB article about them, so I have at least a high level understanding of what they are. My questions:

What can you do with them that would be of any use?

Is it safe to delete them if you find all work was saved properly?

Thanks for the help!!
Troy

[cowboydawg]

Posted: Tue Aug 06, 2002 5:48 am Post subject:

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.GID
.GID files are help index files. They include word lists for the matching help file. They're safe to remove, but when you access the help file next time, WINHLP32 will re-build the .GID file.

.CHK
Whenever you run a disk scan and repair tool, such as ScanDisk or ChkDsk (depending on your operating system), the default action when finding errors on the hard disk (such as invalid clusters) is to save the affected files as a .CHK file, thus "repairing" the error.

If you wish, the files probably can be safely deleted without any problems (use your discretion). You, however, may want to first examine these files with a file hex editor (if you have such a program), checking to see if there is any data contained in the .CHK files that you would like to recover.

.DMP
On NT 4.0 and Win2000, a memory dump file gets created if the OS or an application crashes. In the case of OS crash ("blue screen of death"), the file is named MEMORY.DMP and is created in the %SystemRoot% (most cases, C:WINNT) directory. For applications, the file is called USER.DMP, placed also in %SystemRoot% directory. The USER.DMP file gets created by a program called Dr. Watson.

These files are in hex and not very useful to the average user or sysadmin. One possible use of these files is to send them to Microsoft Tech Support or developers for analysis. Since these files are not very useful in most cases, it is not critical that they get deleted.

[TroyWells]

Thanks for the info!!
Troy