Some Tips for newcomers trying to flash/upgrade

[Guest simonta]

Hi all

I've seen lots of people struggling with a few common problems when trying to flash and/or update their Vegas. Thought I'd drop a few tips in here - perhaps others will add theirs?

Please, try to keep the thread clean. If you are having specific problems, then ask the questions in the appropriate thread and the good folks who hang out there will doubtless help out.

1. If you're on Vista or Win 7, then doing everything as administrator will improve your happiness levels. If you don't know what that means, this tip is for you. If you think you're already running as admin, but you don't know the difference between the "real" admin account on Vista/7 and being in the admins group, then this tip is for you.

Click Start and type cmd but do not press Enter. You will see cmd.exe in the search results. Right click it and select Run As Administrator.

You might want control panel running as admin, especially if you are trying to get the correct USB drivers installed. To do this, simply type control from your administrator cmd prompt and press Enter. Control panel will now run and everything you do from there will have administator rights. So, if you are new to this, do only what you need to do!

However, please, please, please do not be tempted to bypass Vista and 7 security and permanently run as admin just to make it easier. You are asking for a world of pain doing so. If you're on XP, do yourself a favour and change your account from administrator to restricted - but that's a whole thread in it's own right

2. I've seen a lot of trouble caused by people typing incorrect command names and folder names in the Windows command prompt (cmd.exe). To accurately type names, use the Tab key to automatically complete names for you. For example, to get to the Tools folder in the Android SDK where ADB is located, type this (I'm assuming the SDK is installed on the C drive - just change the drive letter if not:

Type (without the quotes) "c:\prog" and press Tab. See how it changes to "C:\Progam Files"? Don't press Enter but type "\and" and press Tab again. Now it should say "C:\Program Files\Android-sdk-windows". If you have other folders that start with "and", just press Tab again. Each press will cycle through the matching folder names. Now type "\to" and press Tab. It should now say "c:\Program Files\Android-sdk-windows\Tools" and you can press Enter to go to that folder. After a little practice, you can whistle around your hard drive with great speed.

For me to get to my SDK tools directory this is exactly what I type. <Tab> means press the tab key. It's fast and totally accurate.

c:\prog<tab>\and<tab>\t<tab>

You can use the same trick to get the correct filenames for any command also. For example, to copy a file called really_long_and_difficult_to_type_file_v5.223 just type "really" and press Tab. Again, if there is more than one match, each press of Tab will cycle through the possibilities. You can do this anywhere in the command to autocomplete a file name. Please note though that this doesn't work with ADB itself as it has it's own command prompt. Be especially careful about backslashes and forwardslashes, \ and /. The are always important and you must get them the right way around!

3. (From Paul and Tay4or). How do you know if you have been successful in getting into Recovery Mode? Open device manager and watch the device tree. When you get into recovery, you will see the tree refresh as Windows adds the nVidia USB recovery driver.

4. For folks who know their way around, Nirsoft have a couple of great utilities for poking around in drivers. Check out DriverView and USBDeview. Driver Manager by L5sg is also very useful.

http://www.nirsoft.net/system_tools.html

http://www.l5sg.com/

No doubt others will chip in. Happy hacking!!!

Cheers