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androidadb

ADB access denied to data folder?

I connected to my live device using the adb and the following commands:

C:\>adb -s HT829GZ52000 shell
$ ls
ls
sqlite_stmt_journals
cache
sdcard
etc
system
sys
sbin
proc
logo.rle
init.trout.rc
init.rc
init.goldfish.rc
init
default.prop
data
root
dev
$ cd data
cd data
$ ls
ls
opendir failed, Permission denied

I was surprised to see that I have access denied. How come I can't browse around the directories using the commandline like this?

How do I get root access on my phone?

Solution

  • If you want to browse everything on your device, you need to do two things:

    1. You need to have a phone with root access in order to browse the data folder on an Android phone. That means either you have a developer device (ADP1 or an ION from Google I/O) or you've found a way to 'root' your phone some other way.
    2. You need to be running ADB in root mode, do this by executing: adb root

    Note that if step-1 is done correctly, step-2 just works (no need to re-build anything from source-codes).