[Desire Q&A, Help & Troubleshooting] Droidzone:
TUTORIAL - EVERYTHING ABOUT ADB - Fully Illustrated

This will be part of a series of Tutorials compiled to better educate the Beginner-Intermediate users in XDA thread, and help them get rid of the "n00b" or "newbie" tag thrown at them! ;)

1. WHAT IS ADB?

ADB or Android Debug Bridge is a command line program which is used to communicate with your Android phone (or an emulator used by programmers). The use of Adb for Android phone users ranges from using it as a tool to get the logcat- A realtime log of the Android system, which allows one to know the cause of any errors. It is very helpful to app hackers to know exctly what block of code does what, and to modify apps accordingly

2. HOW TO USE ADB - Running adb.exe

adb.exe is part of a package of tools called Android SDK or Software Development Kit. For users, the main applications useful for them are adb.exe, fastboot.exe and aapt.exe.

2.1 Installing adb.exe (Windows)

First, download the Android SDK package(exe file) from here The installer will prompt you to download and install the JDK (Java Development Kit) if you dont have it already installed

Next install the exe file and note the location where you install it to.

After install is over, use Windows explorer and navigate to the folder where you installed the SDK.

Double-click the SDK Manager.exe/SDK Setup.exe file at the root of the Android SDK directory.

This will open up the SDK Installation window, where you can choose from a list of packages to install

If you want to use only adb.exe and fastboot.exe, choose to install only the "Android SDK Tools" from the list (See fig 1 below)

That's it, adb.exe is now installed

Fig1:

Take a note of where you install it. It usually installs to a folder named Android-sdk-windows. Once you have it installed, you can copy the entire folder on a portable usb key/CD and use it on any other PC without a need to install it. I recommend that you make it a part of your Android CD (with rooting tools, unrooting tools, gold card etc).

2.2 Using adb.exe-Preparing your PC for running adb.exe quickly

Adding Adb to your Windows Path

Once installed, you should add the location of adb.exe to the* Windows Environment Path variable. To do that, go the subfolder of Android-sdk-windows where adb.exe can be found. Click on the Windows Explorer path displayed on Top, and copy the path to the Clipboard

Go to Start Menu, and Right click Computer, Choose Properties

Choose Advanced System Settings and then Environment variables

Now, add the Location you copied to the Clipboard earlier, to the end of the current path, after adding a ";"(without the quotes) to the end of the current path.

So, in my case, the current path shows:

c:\droidzone\windows; c:\droidzone\blahblah

It now becomes:

c:\droidzone\windows; c:\droidzone\blahblah;C:\Software\Phone\android-sdk-windows\tools

Hit Enter to everything.

From now, whenever you open a Command prompt in Windows, you will be able to execute Adb and Fastboot from there without needing to navigate to the folder where they are installed.

Next step: Elementary Adb commands

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