Trouble getting Android emulator to run in eclipse

Question

Hi there,

I'm new to Android and Eclipse. I'm Trying to run the SDK Samples on the Emulator in Eclipse 3.5

Most of the time the AVD Manager hangs when I try to create a new AVD. When I manage to create an AVD and try to start the emulator I get this:

emulator: ERROR: no search paths found in this AVD's configuration

weird, the AVD's config.ini file is malformed. Try re-creating it.

I'm running the latest version of the SDK on Win7 32 bit. Any Ideas?

Update:

Hi Everyone.

Thanks so much for all your attention and for trying to help. I think I found the source of the problem. I'm running a Hebrew version of WIN 7. My user name is in Hebrew. Apparently this causes a problem for Eclipse. Once I started to suspect that was the problem, I created a new user on the system called DEV and tried to run the emulator under that user... Went like butter.

So that's it. thanks you guys. By now...

Answer 1

I agree with Zian, something is seriously wrong here and you should consider reinstalling. Also make sure of the following:

1) Make sure your avd folder looks sane. This can be found in the .android directory in your home directory. Look in ~\.android\avd\<name-of-avd>.avd\ and you should see config.ini and userdata.img files, plus an sd image if you created one. Make sure your config.ini looks something like this:

hw.sdCard=yes
hw.dPad=yes
hw.accelerometer=yes
hw.lcd.density=160
skin.name=HVGA
skin.path=platforms/android-1.6/skins/HVGA
hw.trackBall=no
hw.ramSize=256
image.sysdir.1=platforms/android-1.6/images/

Or, if you don't have any custom settings, then it will just consist of this one line:

hw.lcd.density=160

2) Make sure you have the latest version of the ADT Eclipse plugin (v0.95).

3) Also, you really truly shouldn't have any permissions problems within your home directory, but hey, it's Windows -- you never know. So you may want to manually set the permissions to the avd/ folder to read/write/execute, just to be sure.

4) Other than that, reinstall with extreme prejudice!

Answer 2

Try to download again the SDK, unzip it and reinstall through Eclipse.

Be sure to have the last version and have configured all the paths in Eclipse preferences correctly.

Answer 3

To make sure everything is installed correctly, I recommend you reinstall all the components. To be sure everything goes correctly follow my step by step instructions on my blog.

http://androidcodemonkey.blogspot.com/2010/01/how-to-setup-android-development_23.html

If you follow all the steps you should be good to go!

Good luck.

Answer 4

If you have installed the Android SDK to a different drive ie not C: then you might need to set the ANDROID_HOME environment variable to the location of the SDK installation

Answer 5

Another consideration I may have overlooked in others answers - I see you mentioned Eclipse 3.5 - consider using 3.5.2 (the current latest version)

May not matter, may have just been omitted by you, either way using the most up to date stuff never hurts.

Answer 6

You can set the environment variable ANDROID_SDK_HOME for example ANDROID_SDK_HOME=D:\Development\android-sdk. It helped me.

Add variable to \configuration.settings\org.eclipse.ui.ide.prefs ANDROID_SDK_HOME=D\:\Development\android-sdk\

Stop process adb.exe and start Eclipse.