Vista, RAM dumps, and OS detection (oh, my!!)

I received an email from Andreas today, and one of the things he mentioned is that the offset for the Vista kernel in memory is 0x81800000...this could be added to my os detection script. So I made the change to my script and ran it against a memory dump that I had from a Vista machine. Nothing. Nada. No impact, no idea. I opened up the memory dump in UltraEdit and saw that there was nothing at the offset...well, at least no PE header.

I then fired up my Vista RC1 VMWare session, and ran LiveKD to see what it reported the kernel base address as (0x81800000), and then I suspended the session. I opened up the resulting .vmem file and ran the script against it...and saw the following:

File Description : NT Kernel & System
File Version : 6.0.5600.16384 (vista_rc1.060829-2230)
Internal Name : ntkrpamp.exe
Original File Name :
Product Name : Microsoft« Windows« Operating System
Product Version : 6.0.5600.16384
File Description : Boot Man╕╝ ç(╝ ç
File Version : 6.0.5600.16384╜ çp╝ çsta_rc1.060829-2230)
Internal Name :
Original File Name :
Product Name : Microsoft« Winh╛ ç╪╜ ç« Operating System
Product Version :

Very cool. To make this change yourself, just add '0x81800000 => "VistaRC1"' to the %kb hash.

Addendum 24 Oct: Sent by Andreas, and confirmed this morning...add '0x82000000 => "VistaBeta2"' (remove outer single quotes) to the %kb hash in kern.pl.

PTFinder Front End

Andreas posted this on his blog, and I took a look at it...very cool. This is a front-end for running PTFinder, and even allows you to choose which operating system you want to run it against. This makes things a little easier to use.

If you have a RAM dump and don't remember which OS it is, as long as it's between Win2k and Win2K3SP1, you can use my OS detection script.

The neat thing is that you can get output that looks like this. Very cool!