my eclipse stopped working today

Question

Hi everyone

Today I was running into problems with eclipse, like every time I closed a project a window popped up saying something like "error saving workspace" and complaining about apache xerces.

I decided to download a fresh install, and now it won't even start. I tried many variants (classic, javase, c++), hoping there was some distribution issues, but nothing worked. Eclipse starts saying "an error has occurred, see configurationlog ..."

Any idea? Are there some cached files in the system that might have become corrupted? I tried doing a "find / | grep eclipse" but found nothing interesting.

Thanks a lot for your help, I'm quite in trouble without it

Regards,

Nicola Montecchio

p.s. I tried also with 32 bit jvm but nothing changed

[edit] here is relevant bits of the log produced when starting:

!ENTRY org.eclipse.osgi 4 0 2010-07-23 21:35:16.835 !MESSAGE An unexpected runtime error has occurred. !STACK 0 javax.xml.parsers.FactoryConfigurationError: Provider org.apache.xerces.jaxp.SAXParserFactoryImpl not found

!ENTRY org.eclipse.osgi 4 0 2010-07-23 21:35:16.839 !MESSAGE !STACK 0 org.osgi.framework.ServiceException: Exception in org.eclipse.core.runtime.internal.adaptor.EclipseAdaptorHook$ParsingService.getService()

!ENTRY org.eclipse.equinox.registry 4 0 2010-07-23 21:35:16.840 !MESSAGE Could not parse XML contribution for "org.eclipse.ant.core//plugin.xml". Any contributed extensions and extension points will be ignored. !STACK 0 org.xml.sax.SAXException: Could not acquire XML parsing service.

and several other mostly related to xml ...

Answer 1

Sounds like your current workspace is severely broken. Create a new workspace and import the projects from the old locations (File -> Import), and see if that helps.

Answer 2

Things I'd try are renaming your workspace (so Eclipse will use a fresh one when starting up) or running Eclipse with the -clean parameter (in the console with ./eclipse -clean in your eclipse/ folder).