Error “The connection to adb is down, and a severe

Question

I've spent days trying to launch any Android program. Even "Hello World" gives me the same error:

"The connection to adb is down, and a severe error has occurred".

I'm running Eclipse v3.5 (Galileo), Google APIs 2.2.8, on a Windows XP machine.

I've used all the tricks I can find on the web: the command line "adb kill-server", the DDMS "reset ADB", I started the emulator both before and after Eclipse, and searched for ports being used by other programs.

What is going on here? Is there a magic combination of versions of Eclipse, Java, ADB, emulator, and whatever else that works?

Answer 1

Update your Eclipse Android development tools. It worked for me.

Answer 2

Use:

Open Task Manager → Processes → adb.exe → End Process → restart Eclipse

This worked for me.

And:

Open Task Manager → Processes → eclipse.exe → End Process → restart Eclipse

Answer 3

If you are using the Genymotion emulator:

Make sure that the SDK path used for Genymotion is also the same path used for the Eclipse.

This error also occurs if those two paths are different.

Answer 4

I tried this using Eclipse Juno and it worked fine:

• From the dropdown of the Run icon, select option Run Configuration.
• Make sure your project is selected
• Go to tab Android
• Under section Launch Action, select Launch Select the package name and voila! try running your application.

UPDATE: It also helps to kill the process adb.exe from the task manager and restart it. adb.exe can be found here: Android\android-sdk\platform-tools.

Good luck

Answer 5

My problem was that my firewall was preventing ADB from binding to the port it wanted to.

Answer 6

The killing of the mysteriously running abd.exe worked. This sudden roadblock stopped me for a long time. I was doing all sorts of command line stuff and removed the lock icon from my user folder, but nothing worked until your simple suggestion of looking for the abd in the running processes of the task manager and killing it.

Another newbie roadblock I discovered an answer to: don't run Eclipse when any file other than the main .java file is active. If you run it when, for example, the main.xml file is active, you will get unhelpful error messages, an odd file created like main.xml.out, and it wont run.