Device not recognized with ADB: What to do when everything else failed

Introduction

This article describes what to do or check when you want your Android device be listed in adb console or Eclipse to debug an application or whatever. Even after installing driver

Background

I encountered this problem with various devices from various manufacturers and on Windows 8 and Windows 8.1 platforms but I had no doubt that you can have this kind of issue in older Windows platforms

It is obvious that if you are here, you have already installed the Android SDK and/or the ADT plugin for Eclipse

Preliminary checks on your device

• Enable USB debugging 

Go to settings, developer options then Android debugging

On newer versions of Android, the developer options is hidden by default, to unlock this menu you have to go to settings, about phone and then tap multiple times on the build number (I think it's 7 times)

• Check USB connection mode 

On older devices, when usb debugging is activated, you have to disable USB mass storage to make the debugging work. Now on newer devices, you have the choice between multiple modes, MTP (mass storage like previously said), PTP (camera mode, don't bother by the name, it's the mode we have to choose) and charging mode (no transfer)

Steps on your desktop

• Manually update the Google's usb driver file

First go to the device manager, right click on your device and click properties. In the details tab, select the Hardware Ids property. Take note of what you see here

Edit the file android_winusb.inf located in \sdk\extras\google\usb_driver:

Copy the lines of an existing device definition below both of [Google.NTx86] and [Google.NTamd64] tags and replace the vendor ID (four chars after VID_) and also replace the product ID (four chars after PID_) by the informations seen in device properties

;NAME OF YOUR DEVICE
%SingleAdbInterface%        = USB_Install, USB\VID_AAAA&PID_BBBB
%CompositeAdbInterface%     = USB_Install, USB\VID_AAAA&PID_BBBB&MI_01

• Add the vendor ID to the adb_usb.ini file

Run a DOS command as administrator (you can never be too careful) and enter the following (just replace the AAAA by your vendor ID):

echo 0xAAAA >> "%USERPROFILE%\.android\adb_usb.ini"

Try to update the device driver

You can try to update the driver now. Go to the device manager, right click on your device, click update driver software... then click on Browse my computer for driver software then Let me pick a list of device drivers on my computer. Here you should select Android devices then in Google devices, Android ADB Composite Driver and you should install the driver.

Here the error you can encounter with Windows 8 or newer is a fail in the driver installation and an error message like 

Quote:

The hash file is not present in the specified catalog file. The file is likely corrupt or the victim of tampering

Workaround

Restart your computer as you ever did: 

Go to the right handed menu of Windows 8 (tickle the right upper corner of the screen) and click settings. You should see at the bottom of the screen Change PC settings. Click Update and recovery. Click recovery again. In the right of your screen, click restart now below advanced startup. Click Troubleshout. Click Advanced options. Click Startup settings to disable temporarily Windows signature verification that caused the error during the driver installation then Restart.

Test

Ror the reminder, here is the command to list the devices recognized by adb:

On your DOS command, move to the \sdk\platform-tools location and enter the following

adb devices