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Offline Symbols for Windows Update

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This topic describes how you can work with offline symbols for Windows Update. It describes a procedure that can be used to decode Windows Update logs on machines that don’t have access to the Microsoft symbol server.

If you find yourself needing to do this often, you should see if setting up a Symbol Proxy Server is viable for your networking configuration. For more information see SymProxy.

All the options below require you to have one machine that can connect to Microsoft’s symbol server, and have the ability to copy files to or from the machine that has the logs. The machine that doesn’t have access to the symbol server will be referred to as the offline machine, and the machine that does have access as the online machine.

We recommend using a single online machine per OS build version so the WU symbol cache will build month-by-month and contain the WU symbols from multiple update releases.

If you have access to an online machine with the same exact patch level as the offline machine, you have two options:

Verify the online and offline PCs the same version level by running winver or ver on both machines.

C:\>ver

Microsoft Windows [Version 10.0.17134.167]

If you don’t have access to an online machine with the same version, you’ll need to go through some extra steps to create a SymChk manifest file, described later in this topic in Option 3: Create a SymChk manifest file.

Option 1: Copy the ETL event log to the online machine

  1. Copy all the WindowsUpdate ETL files from C:\Windows\logs\WindowsUpdate\ to your online machine.

  2. On the online machine, open a PowerShell prompt and run the following Get-WindowsUpdateLog PowerShell command.

    Get-WindowsUpdateLog -ETLPath <path to ETLs>

    This will download the symbols needed for log analysis.

Option 2: Copy the symbols to the offline machine

  1. On the online machine, open a PowerShell prompt and run “Get-WindowsUpdateLog”. This will cache the symbols needed for log analysis.

  2. Copy all the files in %temp%\WindowsUpdateLog\SymCache from the online machine to %temp%\WindowsUpdateLog\SymCache on the offline machine.

  3. On the offline machine, open a PowerShell prompt and run “Get-WindowsUpdateLog” to analyze the logs.

Option 3: Create a SymChk manifest file

  1. On the offline machine, follow steps at Using a Manifest File with SymChk to create a manifest for these files in the system32 directory:

    storewuauth.dll
wuapi.dll
wuauclt.exe
wuaueng.dll
wuautoappupdate.dll
wuuhext.dll
wuuhmobile.dll

  2. Copy the manifest to your online machine.

  3. With the manifest file, use SymChk to download the symbols locally to your online PC.

  4. Copy the folder and symbols you passed to SymChk to %temp%\WindowsUpdateLog\SymCache on your offline PC.

  5. On the offline machine, open a PowerShell prompt and run “Get-WindowsUpdateLog” to analyze the logs.

See Also

Using a Symbol Server.

Symbol Path

Symbol Problems While Debugging