No Shell

[pworcester]

I'm running android 2.0 and when I type adb shell I get the following error;

/system/bin/sh : not a directory (20)

 

[EarlyMon]

USB debugging is on?

 

[pworcester]

yes

 

[EarlyMon]

Wow. Ok, I'm stumped at the moment. Phone model please?

 

[pworcester]

it's a pandigital multimedia ereader that got stuck in a boot loop. sometime adb sees it in recovery but I can't execute a shell to flash_image recovery.img

 

[EarlyMon]

adb devices
shows properly when this is happening?

 

[pworcester]

root@slacklap:/usr/local/android-sdk-linux_86/tools# ./adb devices
List of devices attached
Tablet-P device

 

[EarlyMon]

I can't imagine Linux booting without a shell, and believe I'm reading you right that this once worked and is now related to the entire problem transient you're having.

On the off chance I have that wrong - shell bash for android - xda-developers

 

[pworcester]

I dl'd bash and did the following;

usr/local/android-sdk-linux_86/tools# ./adb push ~paulw/bash /system/bin/sh
'
failed to copy '/home/paulw/bash' to '/system/bin/sh': Not a directory

so maybe my bin directory is trashed? Any way to make a new one?

 

[EarlyMon]

I'd question if the filesystems are ok first. I can't get to the adb pages so I'm going by memory - won't adb mount show the fstab?

Edit - No, I don't think so, but double check...

 

[pworcester]

that doesn't work. not a valid arg

 

[EarlyMon]

I'd not mess with your filesystems at this point.

Moving to tablet area.

 

[pworcester]

GOT IT BACK!
another person on another forum(slatedroid) recognized the problem. I now have a shell!

Thanks!

 

[EarlyMon]

Details, details! How did you fix it?