ADB Question???

[dbu]

I am trying to basically plat around and learn and update some stuff on my droid using this guide. http://www.sholes.info/howto-install...te-sprecovery/

However, I do not understand where to enter all of these commands. I downloaded the SDk and installed the packages but I am not sure what to do next. I tried doing it via command prompt but that failed, so I navigated to the toold folder in the SDK and tried to run adb.exe but it came up with an error saying "this application jas failed to start because AdbWinApi.dll was not found. Re-installing the application may fix this problem." I am doing my best to wrap my head around all of this and I am trying to learn but I am hitting a brick wall right now. Any help would be appreciated. Thanks in advance...

[jone216]

good question i would like to find out my self all i can offer at the moment is some good advice stop what your doing until you get some help we have some good people on this forum wait for a reply

[z0mbiexx]

i shift + right click on the tools folder and then hit "open command here" and type "adb shell" and it starts the shell.. also need the phone in usb debugging mode.

[parkjam]

It sounds like something went south iin your adb install, just typing adb from a command prompt should return a list of possible adb commands.To access the shell on your phone type adb shell, also make sure you turn on USB debugging.

[nerdherd]

I'll try to explain what adb is and how to use it (hopefully this will help you understand what's going on a little):

First off, a lot of steps for rooting your phone and installing ROMs require you to enter commands into the phone's terminal/console (it's the "command prompt" of Linux). Now, you could type those commands in using the Droid's tiny keyboard, but that gets old pretty quickly, so Google made a program called "adb" (Android Debug Bridge) that allows you to give those commands to your phone from your computer using a nice big keyboard (it does other stuff too, but that's all that you need to understand).

Obviously you'll need to download the Android SDK (because that's where you get adb), which you've already done. You can extract the SDK anywhere you want. You don't need to "install" anything, only extract the SDK folder somewhere. Let's assume it's located at "C:\android-sdk-windows\" for this post.

Before you start, you'll want to add the location "C:\android-sdk-windows\tools\" to your system "Path". What that means is that you'll be able to run adb from anywhere once you open up the command prompt. Just by entering "adb (some command)" into the command prompt your computer will say "Hey I don't see a program called adb here, but wait, let me look in these other locations that the user told me to look for it." If you don't add it to the path you have to navigate to "C:\android-sdk-windows\tools\" anytime you want to run adb. The instructions for adding it are found on the sholes.info site.

Now that you have adb added to your system path you'll just open the command prompt and enter whatever command you want to use. There are a lot of different commands you can do, but you can just copy and paste them from the instructions and they'll work just fine. You'll notice that sometimes the instructions tell you to enter "adb shell" and then you get a "$" in the command prompt instead of a "C:\whatever>", that just means that you're directly connected to your phone's terminal and anything you type there will be executed on the phone.

Hopefully that sort of makes sense. This is just what I've figured out in the last few days while rooting my phone and installing some custom ROMS.

Now, to the specific problem at hand: if you're getting the .dll error that means it can't find the AdbWinApi.dll file. Look in the /tools/ folder of the SDK and you should see a file in there called "AdbWinApi.dll". If it's not there then you may have done something strange when extracting the SDK. Extract it again, or download it again.

[dbu]

OMG, I feel like such a dope. I was trying to follow the instructions to the T and I just copied the path out of the instructions instead of where I actually had it extracted on my computer. Fail...

[nerdherd]

Nah, it happens. Because everything seems so far above your head (at least that's how I felt) you just start following things like a robot without realizing what is actually going on. I work much better when I actually understand what I'm doing.

[dbu]

ok, now if I go into adb shell and try to type in a command it says permission denied, so I am assuming it is not letting me have SU permission. SO in adb shell I type su and hit enter then the next line down it gives me a # and if I try to type the command in it says $: not found, wtf?

[nerdherd]

When you type in 'su' something should pop-up on your phone asking for you to approve superuser access. Select the check box to always give permission and then click "allow". You might have to turn your phone's screen on to see the pop-up.

[dbu]

Yeah, I did all that and it still won't do anything.