Can't get fastboot on Mac to see droid a855's.

[aarons510]

I am using a MacBook (OS 10.6.8) with fastboot installed. It works when I use it with a Kindle Fire. I have not one, but three, factory cables, all of which (1) work with the Kindle Fire and (2) seem to work with my two broken-touchscreen a855 droids. I'm pretty sure that I've been able to get the droids into fastboot mode with the factory cable (and, in one case, without it) since (a) the info shown for the droids by System Profiler on the MacBook is very different when I boot with the factory cable (or boot holding down the volume down button) than what it is when I boot normally and connect with a normal cable and (b) I can boot with the factory cable without the battery installed.

But when I run fastboot the way I successfully run it to access the Kindle Fire, it doesn't recognize that the Droid is there. I've tried:

fastboot devices
fastboot -i 0x22b8 reboot
fastboot -i 0x22b8 reboot-bootloader
fastboot -i 0x22b8  getvar product

and all of the last three without '-i 0x22b'.
It hangs either with no message or with the line:
< waiting for device >
until I press ^c, and sometimes I actually have to close the Terminal window to get out of it.

Is there something different I need to do to get fastboot on the Mac to recognize the Droids?

 

[CJM]

I never used fastboot on my a855. I always just used adb. If you have adb setup, type "adb devices" & it'll show the phone. At least that's how it is on my windows xp, don't know if it's the same for a mac.

 

[patmw123]

When I use fastboot on my Mac, I have to start fastboot commands as "./fastboot-mac" instead of just "fastboot" like it is with Windows.

 

[aarons510]

When I use fastboot on my Mac, I have to start fastboot commands as "./fastboot-mac" instead of just "fastboot" like it is with Windows.

I have fastboot in a directory in my UNIX PATH. If I didn't, I would have gotten a 'command not found' response regardless of what arguments I had given to the command, and it wouldn't have worked with the Kindle Fire.

 

[aarons510]

I never used fastboot on my a855. I always just used adb. If you have adb setup, type "adb devices" & it'll show the phone. At least that's how it is on my windows xp, don't know if it's the same for a mac.

I tried adb devices with each combination of cable, device, etc., that I tried fastboot with and got an empty 'List of devices attached'. Problem is that I can't, yet, navigate in Settings to where I can enable USB Debugging. If you know of a way to enable it without using the touch screen, let me know.

Anyway, I still want to know how to get fastboot to work, even if I get adb to work as well.