Debugging Drivers with Visual Studio

[Anonymous]

When I try “Attach to Procees” in visual studio 2008 ( I select kernel mode ), I choose the vm://pipe name and the message box pops up that says “No process is on the other end of the pipe”

In general:
-I installed visual studio 2008,
-I installed virtualBox (newest version). Created a VM (win7x86), setup host networking so that host can ping ip of VM (also shut off firewall).
-Copyed VirtaulKD to a folder on host machine.
-Renamed VBoxDD.dll to VBoxDD0.dll in VirtualBox Folder, and copied x86 version of VBoxDD.dll from VirtualKD
-When I start the virtual machine it gets to the loading windows screen and freezes
-So to unfreeze the guest I run VMMON and select the vm:/pipe and launch the debugger. It connects opens up WinDbg. I hit Go, Go, Go a couple times the guest finishes booting (any way to not have to do this step?) ( I close WinDBG at this point)
– Once guest is booted, I run vistual studio, open a visualDDK default project and I select debug and get errors about not connecting.

Any ideas? Are these the right basic steps?

[Anonymous]

Solved some of my problems.

I was forgetting to launch the launchvisualddk.exe program inside the VM. This is key. The app is set to automatically run but b/c of UAC and win7 security it was not running.

Some tips that worked for me. Turn off UAC, make sure your user account is an Admin account, I even set the Window 7 VM to auto login.

One annoying thing I would still like to figure out is:
When I start the VM it gets to the “load windows” logo screen and freeze (until i run vmmon, start the debugger and hit F5 (go)). Then I have to close windbg and start up visual studio. Any way around this?

[support]

Yes, boot your VM in debug mode and create a snapshot. Then, every time you need to debug anything, just revert to that snapshot et voila!

[Author]

Posts