How to recover corrupted Eclipse workspace?

Question

I just managed to corrupt contents of my Eclipse .metadata directory. Starting up with eclipse -clean did not work out. Deleting .metadata and then importing all projects, p

Answer 1

In my case, it was not the workspace that was broken but Eclipse itself. Even though it seemed like workspace is broken (the same error dialog, etc.), all I had to do was reinstall Eclipse and point it to the old workspace. You can't really repair a broken workspace if it is the workspace that is broken but you can do so just for good measure, maybe it'll work.

Answer 2

I have some experience at recovering from eclipse when it becomes unstartable for whatever reason, could these blog entries help you?

link (archived)

also search for "cannot start eclipse" (I am a new user, I can only post a single hyperlink, so I have to just ask that you search for the second :( sorry)

perhaps those allow you to recover your workspace as well, I hope it helps.

Answer 3

deleting below file helped me solve my eclipse start up issue. Perforce plugin has always troubled me especially when my machine reboots, next time eclipse tries to recover workspace and craps out.

workspace/.metadata/.plugins/org.eclipse.core.resources/.snap

For your reference, Error I was getting: org.eclipse.core.runtime.CoreException: Plug-in com.perforce.team.ui was unable to load class com.perforce.team.ui.UITeamProvider.