Wow, spent a lot of time yesterday trying to do some memory analysis on Windows 8 with a couple open source tools…
And completely failed.
I wanted to analyze a suspended Win8 virtual machine’s memory and see what information could be pulled from it. I know VMWare has a “vmss2core” utility that will do the trick. Of course I had Windows 8 in a Virtualbox VM. No problem, I exported and imported to VMWare Workstation with no problems. Okay, it hung up on first boot in VMWare, but a hard reset and everything was right as rain on the next boot.
Next I suspended the VM, grabbed the .vmem and the .vmss suspension files and tried to run it through vmss2core:
C:\VM>vmss2core.exe -W windows8.vmem windows8.vmss
vmss2core version 812388 Copyright (C) 1998-2012 VMware, Inc. All rights reserved.
Unrecognized .vmss file (magic f000ff53).
Unrecognized .vmss file… Okay, not to be deterred, I rebooted the Windows 8 VM and took a snapshot. Vmss2core also works with snapshots!
Same error.
I actually read the help features for Vmss2core and realized that it has a “-W8” command for Windows 8! Doh!
Used that… Same error…
Okay, bothered now, but still undeterred, I figured I would just boot the system up and run MoonSols DumpIt command to get a copy of the active RAM. Then I can use the memory dump output and feed it into Volatility!
Or so I thought…
DumpIt works great for grabbing a full copy of your active RAM so you can analyze it for artifacts. Simply Download the file, and place it where you want it – USB drive, hard drive etc. Then just run the command, and the full active memory of the system will be saved in the same directory.
I ran DumpIt in Windows 8 and it worked flawlessly:

Yeah! Now all I need to do is take the .raw memory dump file and feed it into the memory analysis program Volatility. And I should be able to see tons of information and artifacts including network connections, users, services and other goodies! 🙂
I started out by using the imageinfo command. This command returns the exact operating system level to Volatility so that it correctly maps memory locations with services when you use the more advanced commands.
(I created a whole series on using volatility to perform analysis on Windows 7 last year)
When I ran Volatility, it was unable to determine the OS level. I was using the latest version that just came out this month. A quick search on their website and it looks like Wind0ws 8 functionality will not be out for several more months…
Well, that was the final brick wall for me. I had other things to do and had to walk away from it at that point.
Anyone have any ideas or know of any other open source memory analysis tools like Volatility that will work with Windows 8?