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Ghidra : unable to find PDB and Couldn't find type info structure

I downloaded Ghidra about a week ago(I am new to reverse engineering), I did what the tutorial video from Ghidra official site was showing, I made a simple C++ program to Visual Studio, the program has an infinity while(while(1)) that prints "Hello World!" to the screen(std::cout << "Hello World!";). I used Ghidra to disassemble that program as the person at the tutorial did it, but I am getting errors.

The errors :

PDB> ERROR: Unable to locate the DIA SDK. It is required to load PDB files.
* See docs/README_PDB.html for DLL registration instructions.


PDB> ERROR: Unable to locate the DIA SDK. It is required to load PDB files.
* See docs/README_PDB.html for DLL registration instructions.


Windows x86 PE RTTI Analyzer> Couldn't find type info structure.

I saw "README_PDB.html", I did what it said there to do, but still the errors, all of them, where there.

After some time I found out that the folder my .exe was stored had also a [name of my exe].pdb file and that when you choose analyzers there is an analyzer "PDB" and if you click on it will let you insert a path, tried to insert the path to the parent folder of that .pdb, but still nothing changed.

So : How can I make this work, please anyone, I am desperate

Solution

  • Based on the error, it seems you are running ghidra on Windows, and the error is referred to at the README_PDB and load_pdb sites. Maybe the problem is with Visual Studio rather than ghidra.

    Quoting from there:

    In order for the native PDB parser to work on your Microsoft Windows machine, you must:

    1. Ensure you have msdia140.dll on your computer, and
    2. Register msdia140.dll in the Windows registry.

    and:

  • The following instructions assume you have a 64-bit operating system. If you have rebuilt pdb.exe with a newer version of the DIA SDK you will need to register the corresponding version of the 64-bit DLL. The DIA SDK 14.0 corresponds to Visual Studio 2017.

  • The PDB format is known to change over time and may be incompatible with the current pdb.exe parser contained within Ghidra. A Microsoft Visual Studio project is provided within the Ghidra/Features/PDB/src/pdb directory which will allow you to rebuild it with a newer version of Visual Studio and DIA SDK.