Why does the Android emulator report “unknown virtual device”, when the device is in my user directory?

Question

I installed all the prerequisites for Android development. I created a virtual device through Eclipse and tried to run the Hello World sample application in that device. I recei

Answer 1

Android Virtual Device Tool

The Virtual Device tool in the SDK Manager creates virtual devices in your user profile directory... in this case a secondary drive

D:\Users\anthony\.android

But, the emulator tries to load virtual device images from the system drive

C:\Users\anthony\.android

Directory Junction

There are two workarounds. First, you can create a directory hard-link (or junction) from the system drive android folder to the one in your user profile. In Windows 7, you can use the following command

mklink /J C:\Users\anthony\.android D:\Users\anthony\.android

Android Home

The Android SDK Manager and emulator can use an environment variable ANDROID_SDK_HOME to identify the location of the .android directory. Set a user or environment variable

ANDROID_SDK_HOME = 'D:\Users\anthony'