"Context is partially valid" Windbg error

Vir Gnarus · Mar 16, 2012

Hi all,

I've come across this error only a couple times in the crashdumps I've ran through Windbg. It shows up early before you do an !analyze -v, and the result is a strange prompt and the data ends up being missing or odd. The error is as followed:

Code:

The context is partially valid. Only x86 user-mode context is available.
The wow64exts extension must be loaded to access 32-bit state.
.load wow64exts will do this if you haven't loaded it already.

If you see this, that means you came across a bug in Windows 7/2008 R2 that bugs out the processor context that's saved when generating the crashdump. This only seems to occur on processors that have particular special features enabled on it.

The solution is to have the individual sending the crashdumps to download the hotfix here. Then after installation they'll have to have new crashdumps generated.

Patrick · Jun 25, 2014

I'd like to go ahead and bump this by saying I actually found this via a Google search, which provided quite a smile.

In any case, in my situation I had installed W7 x64 to a VM and was using NotMyFault to generate all sorts of cool kernel-dumps for analysis. What was the problem?

Code:

STACK_TEXT:  
00000000 00000000 00000000 00000000 00000000 0x0

Code:

FAILURE_ID_HASH_STRING:  km:invalid_kernel_context

Code:

The context is partially valid. Only x86 user-mode context is available.
The wow64exts extension must be loaded to access 32-bit state.
.load wow64exts will do this if you haven't loaded it already.

After installing the hotfix in VG's post, I got a complete dump : )

What I imagine was the problem was my VM OS was as basic as it gets. It was W7 x64 with WU disabled, therefore none of the updates and hotfixes were installed. Because of this, the only thing I can think of was this hotfix (or at least one like it) is installed when running WU, but since I didn't, I obviously didn't have the hotfix installed.

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"Context is partially valid" Windbg error

Vir Gnarus

BSOD Kernel Dump Expert

Patrick

Sysnative Staff