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

I am running Eclipse Neon2. on Mac OS 10.12.4 and I experienced this issue after recently upgrading my Android SDK to the latest "SDK Tools" (v 25.2.5), "Platform tools" (v 26) and "Build Tools" (v 26) and moving one of my development projects to Android Studio.

Unfortunately none of the many answers here worked for me.

What did work was to create a separate copy of the Android SDK in a different folder and then point Eclipse to it via "Preferences --> Android". You will have to use an older version of the SDK as indicated in this SO answer.

Once you've downloaded the separate version of the SDK and put it in a different folder than your main Android SDK, launch the SDK Manager (via <separate-sdk>/tools/android) and install the required "Platform tools", "Build-tools" and Android versions. There are two important things to observe here though:

1. Make sure that you do not upgrade your "SDK Tools" beyond the version that's already installed!

2. Make sure that you install a version of the "Build tools" that is less than 26!

Otherwise you may run into this issue.

Answer 2

1. Go to the tools folder of your Android SDK
2. Run emulator.exe -avd <your avd>. It will take some time for the emulator to run.
3. Once you see the homescreen on your emulator, open Eclipse and run your program again...

Answer 3

Try the below steps:

1. Close Eclipse if running
2. Go to the Android SDK platform-tools directory in the command prompt
3. Type adb kill-server (Eclipse should be closed before issuing these commands)
4. Then type adb start-server
5. No error message is thrown while starting the ADB server, then ADB is started successfully.
6. Now you can start Eclipse again.

It worked for me this way.

Restart your phone as well!

Answer 4

In my situation: I have the same warning: The connection to adb is down, and a severe error has occured

I have found the solution:

The adb.exe was moved from: android-sdk-windows\tools\adb.exe to android-sdk-windows\platform-tool\adb.exe.

Only thing. Move file adb.exe to \tools. And restart Eclipse.

Answer 5

Simply go in Task Manager (windows users) and kill the abd.exe (it is remaining active somehow). After that start Eclipse.

The error

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

happened after installing plugin for Android of Netbeans. After closing Netbeans the process abd.exe remained active. When you want to start again Eclipse ... you will get the error.

You have to manually kill the adb.exe and then start Eclipse.

It worked for me.

Answer 6

It worked for me to start my AVD emulator first (from the AVD manager), and then to run my program. The other stuff mentioned here.

(Restarting the ADB server didn't work though.)