Hello, well what do you exactly mean by reading the memory dump file (vmcore)?
Actually, these files can be debugged using mdb (or kmdb) and adb (or kadb) utilities which are built in tools of Solaris.
But if you want to just see the contents then either you can use strings command(which dint work in ur case), apart from this there is another CCS utility called "nm" which can help u to see the contents of unix.0 - /usr/ccs/bin/nm unix.0 x :D, but for vmcore.0 you need to use the mdb or adb debuggers to analyze or view the crash dump file.
I use these on a daily basis, so if you encounter any problems, you can always revert to me.
my system got panic and crashed, it generated vmunix.0 file. To analyse I am using mdb utility but I am not sure what is the correct was of using it. I am getting this
# mdb -k vmcore.0
mdb: vmcore.0 is not an ELF file