ADB and Fastboot Errors

I ran into a couple interesting problems when I flashed a new ROM on a Nexus 6. One involving adb sideload and another with fastboot (flash-all.sh provided by google to quickly flash the stock image)

Note: Using Nexus 6 with Cyanogen Mod 12 (Lollipop) and Ubuntu 15.10

Android Debug Bridge Protocol Fault

I installed android-tools-adb and android-tools-fastboot from the official Ubuntu repositories in order to connect to the phone. I ran adb devices to identify the phone and then attempted to sideload an image.

I was met with error: protocol fault (no status). Uh oh.

$ adb devices
List of devices attached
<id of phone> sideload
$ adb sideload android.zip
error: protocol fault (no status)

Adb version 1.0.32 is required to communicate with Android 5.0 (or greater). The offical Ubuntu repositories contain version 1.0.31.

Nicolas Bernaerts published a guide to updating adb on Ubuntu. I ran the following commands to update adb.

$ adb version
Android Debug Bridge version 1.0.31
$ wget -O - https://skia.googlesource.com/skia/+archive/cd048d18e0b81338c1a04b9749a00444597df394/platform_tools/android/bin/linux.tar.gz | tar -zxvf - adb
$ sudo mv adb /usr/bin/adb
$ sudo chmod +x /usr/bin/adb
$ adb version
Android Debug Bridge version 1.0.32

Fastboot Remote Failure (data size exceeds download buffer)

Instead of flashing a new Cyanogen Mod image, I decided to flash Google's factory image for the Nexus 6. Google provides a handy tarball that contains all the files necessary to flash your phone and a handy shell script flash-all.sh which should flash all the image files.

When I ran the shell script I was met with a (bootloader) Data size exceeds download buffer error. Uh oh.

$ ./flash-all.sh
...
sending 'system' (2048781 KB)...
(bootloader) Data size exceeds download buffer
FAILED (remote failure)
finished. total time: 0.940s

I extracted the contents of image-shamu-mmb29q.zip reveling boot.img cache.img recovery.img system.img and userdata.img. I manually flashed each file in the following order while inside the bootloader:

Running fastboot flash userdata userdata.img will wipe your phone

fastboot flash bootloader bootloader.img
fastboot reboot-bootloader
fastboot flash radio radio.img
fastboot reboot-bootloader
fastboot flash system system.img
fastboot flash userdata userdata.img
fastboot flash boot boot.img
fastboot flash recovery recovery.img
fastboot erase cache
fastboot flash cache cache.img

After I flashed each of the image files I booted into recovery and did a factory data reset and rebooted.