Eclipse Failure At Startup

Open Source 7 May 2007 13 Comments



I have had Eclipse 3.2.x crash on me. It seems to freeze on the splash screen. After waiting for a long time, I looked at the log and one of the message says: “A workspace crash was detected. The previous session did not exit normally.”.

I tried to relaunch Eclipse with an option -clean

$ /usr/lib/eclipse/eclipse -clean

But no luck. Reinstall Eclipse is not the better choice for me. Then, I come up with a solution is to reconfigure my workspace. I’ve to renamed my .metadata folder into a different name ( .metadata_bak for example, we will used it later ) and start Eclipse again. It will asked you to choose a workspace. I choose my current folder (current workspace) and it will create a new .metadata folder. After that, I copied old preferences settings into the new one.

cp .metadata_bak/.plugins/org.eclipse.core.runtime/.settings/* .metadata/.plugins/org.eclipse.core.runtime/.settings/

Oh! This is not finish yet. Next, is to import existing projects. By doing this, Eclipse will never see our existing projects. Then, We’ve to import it. Go to File -> Import .. -> General -> Existing projects and Select Root as our current workspace folder. Select all projects & click Finish.

This is the quickest fix that I can think. If you’ve better solution, please feel free to comment.



  • http://david.copithorne.com David Copithorne

    I couldn’t find a better solution, so thanks Sumardi, your post saved me a lot of hassle!

  • Bob Gates

    I had a similar problem, try removing the .metadata/.plugins/org.eclipse.core.resources/.snap file

  • Kennet

    Your suggestion help me too, just deleting the .snap file was not enough. Thanks for the tip!

  • Greg

    Thanks for the post Sumardi. Your instructions are clear and they worked for me. I’m so glad you made the effort to record your solution.

  • Holger Thurow

    Thank you very much! It worked for me too.

  • Patrick

    Thanks for the fix; I was able to quickly recover. I believe my issue was due to something within my .plugins folder. I copied them over to the new .metadata folder and the same issue happened again. I just created a new .metadata folder and imported my projects. Issue solved!

  • ahm

    my eclipse crashed and I did the same, but It does not work for me. The IDE opens up but most menu items are either disabled or not working. I am feeling screwed up :( . any suggestions would be appreciated. Thanks

  • ahm

    Ok it has started working now for no apparent reason :) ..anyway, thanks for the above tips

  • http://quinnzblog.blogspot.com Quinn Carver

    This is awesome.. thanks, totally worked. NOW! If I could just figure out a way to fix the “Project has bad description” issue when I try to re-import the offending project back into the workspace. :) Google-grep powarz activate!

  • hagnat

    your solution is still solving problems… thank you :)

  • RJP

    removing the .snap file (as described by Bob Gates) and importing the projects afterwards did the trick for me. No need to move the .metadata directory.

  • YogeshP

    Thanx a lot Sumardi….You Saved loat of time!!!!

  • Diego

    works fine.. thanks a lot….