Dumps may be taken either to a dedicated FAT hard disk partition or to diskette. For details on setting up the dump partition refer to the TRAPDUMP CONFIG.SYS command description.
Dumps taken to a hard disk partition may be used directly by Dump Formatter or PMDF.
Dumps taken to diskette have their data compressed and have to be decompressed to produce a single dump file. This may be done from within PMDF by selecting the New option of the File pull-down. PMDF offers the additional facility of decompressing diskette dumps directly from diskette images created by OS2IMAGE. See PMDF File Menu below, for details.
Sometimes PMDF fails to decompress a dump. This normally occurs when diskette 1 has not been re-inserted to complete the dump process. If this happend the PATCHDMP utility may be used to correct the dump header on the fist diskette. PATCHDMP may be found on the accompanying CDROM.
If PMDF is not being used then the DCOMP command may be used to decompress a dump. The syntax for DCOMP is as follows:
──── NDCOMP ───┬──────┬─ source drive ─── file name ─────────────
└─ /f ─┘