This question came up on the microsoft.public.windbg newsgroup and turned out to be more complicated to solve than it might appear, so I’m posting about it here.
Someone asked if there is a way to use the DTW tools to detect if a binary is present on a symbol repository. Now, you might naively assume that you can just use symchk.exe on the binary and it will work, and indeed if you try this, you might be fooled into thinking that it does work. However, it really doesn’t – if you do this, all that symchk will do is verify that the symbols for the binary are on the symbol repository.
If you need to make sure that the binary is there (i.e. so you can do dump file debugging using the symbol repository), then you need to use the “/id filename” command line parameter with symchk. This tells symchk that you want to verify that symbols for a dump file exist on the symbol server. Because DbgEng lets you load a single PE image (.dll/.exe/.sys/etc) as a dump file, and because dump files require loading the actual binary itself from the symbol path, this forces symchk to verify that the binary (and not just the symbols) exist on the symbol repository.