So occasionally I run into people trying to analyze a managed mini-dump and they have problems. They run a command like !dumpobj and it fails.
The reason that these commands fail is that the CLR stores all it’s data in virtual memory. That memory is not written when creating a mini-dump.
In order to run SOS commands, many CLR data structures need to be traversed. When creating a mini-dump without full memory, special functions are called at dump creation time to bring those structures into the mini-dump, and allow a minimum set of SOS debugging commands to work. At this time, those commands that can provide full or partial output are:
CLRStack Threads Help PrintException EEVersion
For a mini-dump created with this minimal set of functionality in mind, you will get an error message when running any other commands. A full memory dump (obtained with ".dump /ma <filename>" in the Windows Debugger) is the best way to debug a managed program at this level.